And I have a feeling this story is– I’m sorry to say it– bird brained but in a good way. And with me today is another SciFri staff member who likes birds a lot herself, Producer Christie Taylor. It was kind of a nice thing to do with all that time, and we’ve talked about birds a lot in the past on this program, how smart they are, how their vision works, even some of the physics of how their feathers can be so brightly colored. I spent a lot of time watching my bird feeder this pandemic. Follow Chris Torres’ research on Twitter.Learn more about Julia Clarke’s research.Credit: Christopher Torres/The University of Texas at Austin. This suggests that brain differences may have affected survival during the mass extinction that wiped out all nonavian dinosaurs. The ancestors of living birds had a brain shape that was much different from other dinosaurs (including other early birds). Plus, why studying the end-Cretaceous mass extinction could provide data for understanding what animals will survive modern global warming. Paleontologists Julia Clarke and Chris Torres, co-authors on the new research, join producer Christie Taylor for a conversation about the clues, the unknowns, and what fossils still can’t reveal.

Credit: Christopher Torres/The University of Texas at Austin (Right) A transparent 3D rendering of the fossil bird skull showing the position of the brain (pink). (Left) A fossil of a skull of Ichthyornis, a bird that lived 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period. Their logic was that if the brain of Ichthyornis was different from modern birds, that difference might explain why Ichthyornis died with the dinosaurs, while the ancestors of modern birds survived. Writing in the journal Science Advances last month, a team of researchers looked at a newly discovered fossil skull from a cousin of modern birds, a bird called Ichthyornis, which went extinct with the rest of the non-avian dinosaurs. Paleontologists are still searching for why birds didn’t die, and what traits their ancestors possessed that allowed them to inherit the planet, along with mammals and other survivors. Today’s birds are the last of the dinosaurs, descendents of ancestors that didn’t just survive this mass extinction, but evolutionarily exploded into thousands of species distributed around the world. The loss of species included most dinosaurs, but not all. Sixty-six million years ago, thanks to the Chicxulub meteor-and possibly additional stressors like volcanic eruptions-85% of the species on Earth went extinct, and the Cretaceous period drew to a close. An illustration of Ichthyornis, a bird that lived 70 million years ago during the late Cretaceous Period.

Late bird dinosaur