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Copyright © 2024 CGTN. 京ICP备20000184号
Disinformation report hotline: 010-85061466
An international team of evolutionary biologists has found evidence that modern bird species began diversifying long before the dinosaurs went extinct. The discovery was recently published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
A screenshot shows the two lineages of Neoaves from the article published on the website of PNAS.
Prior research has suggested that millions of years ago the asteroid that struck Earth not only killed all of the non-bird dinosaurs, it also set the modern birds on a path of divergence.
The research group led by Chinese and American scholars analyzed the genomes of hundreds of species of birds to create an evolutionary tree for Neoaves, a clade that consists of about 95 percent of modern birds. In this new effort, the group found evidence that the diversification of Neoaves began long before the extinction of dinosaurs.
They found modern birds had a common ancestor that lived approximately 130 million years ago. They also found that the two main branches of Neoaves split early in their history, with one branch eventually representing land birds and the other waterbirds.
"The two bird lineages diverged during the Late Cretaceous, long before the dinosaurs went extinct," said Wu Shaoyuan, the lead author and a professor at the Jiangsu Normal University in China.