yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Are Birds Modern-Day Dinosaurs? | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

When an asteroid slammed into Earth 66 million years ago, only about 20% of all animal species survived. So, whatever happened to these lucky few? Birds come from a long line of survivors. It started millions of years before the asteroid strike with a dinosaur family called theropods.

The theropod family featured reptilian specimens, some of which had bird-like traits, including feathers and 3-toed feet. A distant cousin of theropods in today's birds was the Archaeopteryx. Fossils from Germany date the animal to about 150 million years ago, and they show how the animal may have even had both reptilian and avian traits. Many ancient birds would also exhibit this mishmash of traits, but eventually, some of these avian dinosaurs evolved to have more recognizably bird-like characteristics.

One example is the sparrow-sized sonorous sentences discovered in China around 1990. The archaic creature is considered one of the first birds capable of flight. In 1992, a new specimen was discovered in Antarctica called Vegavis iaai. The 67 million year-old creature may have looked like a duck and sounded like one. The fossil included a vocal organ called a syrinx, which is only found in today's quacking waterfowl.

About a million years after the time of the asteroid's strike, Earth redirected the evolutionary paths of many animals, including birds. Three bird groups of the theropod family managed to make it through such a cataclysmic event, and scientists are still uncertain as to how. Ever since, birds have been able to adapt and evolve, eventually blooming into the over 10,000 species alive today.

So, the next time you're looking out at your bird feeder, remember that you're looking at the modern-day dinosaurs. [Music]

More Articles

View All
Worked example: Using oxidation numbers to identify oxidation and reduction | Khan Academy
What we have here is a reaction that involves iodine, manganese, oxygen, and hydrogen. What we want to do in this video is think about which of the elements are being oxidized in this reaction and which of the elements are being reduced in this reaction. …
Homeroom with Sal & David Siegel - Wednesday, July 14
Hi everyone, Sal Khan here from Khan Academy. Welcome to the Homeroom live stream! It’s been a little while since we last saw each other, so it’s so good to see you again. We have an exciting conversation today with David Siegel, who’s a co-chair, co-foun…
The President as Commander-in-Chief | American civics | US government and civics | Khan Academy
So I’m here with Jeffrey Rosen, head of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, and we’re continuing to talk about Article Two of the U.S. Constitution, which talks about the powers of the president. Now we’re going to focus a little bit on the …
Assassination politics: Not inevitable
In my previous video, I described Jim Bell’s idea of assassination politics and said that I agreed with him that the emergence of such a system seemed inevitable. Thanks to the user, peace requires anarchy. I’ve since read an article by Bob Murphy, which …
Sine and Cosine come from circles
Now I’m going to clear off the screen here, and we’re going to talk about the shape of the sign function. Let’s do that. This is a plot of the sign function, where the angle Theta—this is the Theta axis in this plot—where Theta has been plotted out on a s…
The Leap Year as Explained by Neil deGrasse Tyson | StarTalk
Lee: Piers, no, they don’t happen all the time. But neither do presidential elections. But people don’t freak out with it. Well, it’s a presidential election year. It’s rare—notes every four years. Chill out! We, on Earth, as we orbit the Sun, we know ho…