Posted on 12/13/2015 9:12:47 PM PST by Utilizer
Every bird alive today can trace its ancestry to creatures that lived about 95 million years ago on a chunk of land that split off from the supercontinent Gondwana, a new study suggests. The new family tree, compiled using information from fossils and from genetic analyses of modern birds, also reveals that this lineage underwent a major burst of evolution after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago and killed off the rest of their dinosaurian kin.
"This is one of the most comprehensive studies that attempts to date when these evolutionary divergences happened," says Luis Chiappe, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California, who wasn't involved in the new research.
Modern birds, a group called Neornithes (a name that combines neo and a variant of ornis, the Greek words for "new" and "bird," respectively) are the most diverse and widespread vertebrates on Earth today. Previous studies that used only information from genetic analyses of current species have suggested that birds arose anywhere from 72 million to 170 million years ago. But the new study, which includes anatomical data extinct species preserved in the fossil record, narrows that window considerably, says Joel Cracraft, an ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.sciencemag.org ...
Thought this one might interest you, mate. :)
BTW, the chicken came before the egg...
Birds are the dinosaurs that didn’t get zapped by the low inside slider God put in the Yucatan, at the aforementioned 66 million year mark.
Not true. Factually speaking, eggs were about long before there were any “chickens”.
But was it the one at the K-T boundary, or a different one?
God created creatures not eggs
>>So global extinction events were more important to determining how our world came about than one might have supposed... <<
Well, yeah.
All those caveman fires caused it to happen and women and minorities were hardest hit!
whacko birds
May I remind you that dinosaurs were living here long before there were any recognized “chickens” (the species) running about, and I believe it has been firmly established that dinosaurs laid eggs.
Dunno what game you are going on about but you are a bit confused by things I believe.
Cheers! :)
You forgot about all the evil SUVs -and the GloBull ‘warming’ that killed all the glaciers and the mammoths and such! AlBore warned us!! It happened before and it will happen again!
(pant, pant!) OK, breathing normally now. :p *grin*
Love it
I'll see your whacko birds
...and raise you a dyno-chicken
Go ahead. Try to raise
or Trump that
If you dare.
Aha. So it could not have been simply a matter of slowly accumulated changes resulting from random mutation transcription errors, the unfit sorted out by natural selection.
Good thing those dinosaurs didn't develop shielding against Giant rocks from Outer Space, or we humans could have ended up being giant chicken feed.
Steven J. Gould, paging Steven Gould, Tokyo and
(something about punctuation and equilibrium)
Thanks Utilizer.
Welcome, mate. Always been interested in Extinction Events, and this article caught My eye so of course I immediately thought of you and your interests. :)
Hope you find some tidbits worth pursuing in the article referenced.
Cheers!
JimSea had posted another article about bird survival of the K-T extinction boundary, and I’d pinged that to the same two lists, but this really was a good take on what I think is probably the same underlying story.
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