Birds. Are they appeared after the extinction of the dinosaurs? – West France

Most of the more than 10,000 species of birds appeared “quickly” after the extinction of the dinosaurs and not millions of years ago, shows a large genomic study also sheds new light on their evolution and that of humans.

This work for four years by an international team of 200 scientists from twenty countries have sequenced the genome of 48 major avian species (ostrich, duck, hawk, parrot, ibis, eagle …), which is unprecedented for a single animal family.

They gave held in 28 studies, eight of which are published in the journal Science . They show that only a few species of birds survived the extinction of the dinosaurs there are 66 million years and other animals then went through a kind of “big bang” , c ‘ is to say an accelerated evolution for the emergence in less than fifteen million years of spectacular avian diversity.

The archosaurs

This contradicts the hypothesis advanced up ‘Now that the so-called modern birds had appeared 10 to 80 million years before the dinosaurs disappeared.

One of these studies also allowed to go back to the common ancestor of birds , crocodile – their closest living cousin – and dinosaurs. archosaurs

Humans and birds have the same genes sound

These scientists also determined that the chicken sharing more similarities in its chromosomes with dinosaurs than other birds.

According six other studies, some bird species have the same genes as humans for learning the sounds.

“We have long known that there are similarities between birdsong and human speech but we did not know if the same genes were involved … and the answer is yes” , said Erich Jarvis, a researcher from Duke University (North Carolina).