ZONAUTARA.COM — Have you ever wondered why dinosaurs went extinct but birds didn’t? A recent study may be able to answer your curiosity.
Birds are descended from dinosaurs
Birds are actually descended from dinosaurs. However, how can and what makes birds adapt and live to this day?
The origin of birds comes from two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods. He was a meat eater who lived about 231 million years ago in the Triassic period.
Tyrannosaurus was also part of the group. Modern theropods and birds have several things in common, including the presence of feathers and the ability to lay eggs. In addition, modern birds can fly, but not theropods.
Birds are part of a large group of dinosaurs, just as humans are part of a large group of mammals. There are many similarities between birds and dinosaurs.
“Birds are living dinosaurs,” said Julia Clarke of the University of Texas at Austin, co-author of the study, entitled Bird neurocranial and body mass evolution across the end-Cretaceous mass extinction: The avian brain shape left other dinosaurs behind.
“All birds that exist today have a common lineage, namely theropod dinosaurs,” he continued. However, the sizes of birds and dinosaurs were distinctly different. In this section, researchers believe that there was miniaturization around 200 million years ago.
Coelusaurs, the subgroup of theropods that produce today’s birds, grew smaller in size due to the intense evolutionary process.
Differences in brain shape
A study looked at the well-preserved fossils of Ichthyornis that lived about 70 million years ago. This fossil can explain how the survival of birds.
Ichthyornis has bird-like characteristics and dinosaur. It has many teeth in its jaws and it has a beak. Its well-preserved skull led scientists to compare the brains of prehistoric birds to those of modern birds.
Research done
The researching researchers can use CT imaging to create a 3-dimensional replica of a bird’s brain or an endocast.
The results revealed that the brain of Ichthyornis was more similar to that of a dinosaur than that of a modern bird. The part of the brain responsible for the cognitive function of Ichthyornis was much smaller than that of modern birds.
Different brains may be an important element in helping birds survive extinction. “From this test it is possible that the brain plays a major role in the survival of birds,” said Christopher Torres, lead author of the study.
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