Sentences with phrase «only modern birds»
That makes it even stranger that only modern birds got them right for flight.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/ Not exact matches
Archaeopteryx remains the oldest known bird fossil, not only documenting the evolutionary transition from reptiles to birds, but also confirming that modern birds are the direct descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs.
Human activities could change the pace of evolution, similar to what occurred 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving modern birds as their only descendants.
Why only some of them survived to become modern - day birds remains a mystery.
Modern birds, long thought to have arisen only after the dinosaurs perished, turn out to have lived alongside them
Not only does the bird look nearly modern, but it was apparently a water dweller, showing that «ancient birds became specialized in their respective habits» very early, says paleontologist Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County in California.
It's weird because birds living at the same time elsewhere in the world are only distantly related to modern birds (they had teeth, may have been fairly poor fliers, etc).