A fossil feather preserved inside dinosaur poop could help explain why birds survived the mass extinction
Birds are a specialized kind of dinosaur, and they've been around for a long time. The earliest known bird is Archaeopteryx, from 150 million years ago, and birds continued to evolve and co-exist alongside their fellow dinosaurs for nearly 100 million years. In the aftermath of the Earth’s collision with an asteroid 66 million years ago, nearly all the dinosaurs, including nearly all the birds, went extinct. But one group of birds, Neornithes, survived, and every living bird today is one of their descendants.
One of the biggest mysteries in paleontology is why this one small group of birds survived, when all the other birds and all the other dinosaurs died out.
“We think the types of feathers that these birds had, and/or the way they molted those feathers, may have been one of the underlying causes of the selectivity of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction—essentially, why some birds died out and why others survived,” she says.
The feathers on a bird’s body help insulate it from the cold. If the hesperornithiforms’ and enantiornithines’ feathers weren’t as good at keeping their bodies warm as Neornithes’ feathers, that could have been a major factor in these groups’ abilities to survive the impact winter following the asteroid strike 66 million years ago.
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