howdy all right so we've covered the rise and uh the rise of dinosaurs and the fall of dinosaurs my job today is to try to convince you that maybe the dinosaurs of the dinosaurs you don't think of as dinosaurs Aven dinosaurs birds are just as cool as the non-avian dinosaurs it's not like dinosaur evolution ended at the Cretaceous paleogene boundry with the mass extinction no you know a big rock Bell out of the sky some cool animals definitely died and did not have any descendants afterwards that's definitely true but there was also a lot of really cool animals that got through that mass extinction survived and diversified in that world after it and those animals are really cool as well um and they have an incredible amount of diversity and they do things that no other group of animal has ever done before um so this is sort of a throwback to when I was telling you guys about the evolution of flight but you might recall that you know we've got Velociraptors and noar Raptors and trudon trudon and Etc and then we have Arch opter and then we have J orus which uh um has some few more adaptations toward where it's being um uh sort of more birdlike than arop and then we have confusa orus that one actually loses its tail so it has a piga style which is a very common bird thing to have and you might think of it is really the thing that when I look at Birds what makes them so different from a non-avian dinosaur they don't have a tail all right part of the thing of when you're thinking about what a dinosaur is is you're thinking about that big massive tail which we don't even think about which we don't see in mammals either right they have these little skinny Tails right your dog and your cat and the mouse and the rat and the the cow they have little skinny Tails what's going on with that well that's because dinosaurs attached their muscles for their thigh to their tail all right and that actually gave them more um space for this uh uh to pull back that leg also meant when they run that their tail pry wag back behind them that's kind of funny you don't I don't think jassic Park shows that one too much but because they had that big space that meant that they actually were really powerful runners okay they gave them a little more kick when they move with their legs that's great birds had to invent something new they kind of I guess they probably wanted to get rid of that tail anyway right there was probably SEL against having a big tail and so they end up moving that attachment back more normally to the hip just like mammals have it and then they reduce the tail down to this little raw the pig style which they then attach all sorts of feathers to because now that's really useful for display and also for slightly shifting back and forth while they're flying that adjusts their flight behavior um so we have Jello orus and confusa ores which has a pig style and after confus orus we start to get into really the Mesozoic radiation of birds and that is particularly a group that is known now as the E NES I'm sorry all bird names are going to be long and they're going to have like oret or orid in them somewhere um these had now jeal orus I believe was toothless it actually had lost teeth but we know that that teeth are lost and even even regained in case across bird Evolution so teeth isn't something that you can just rely on so there's a whole bunch of there's like 80 known species of indan the orians from the mesic and they had um a pig style like confus gorist does but they also had teeth and Claws after after uh closely related to them really is a bird which is very well known to North American paleontologists we find it everywhere all across North America and that is hesperornis hesperornis was um a flightless bird it fact practically had no wings it looked like this uh all right it it was a diving bird you can probably tell it would have looked a lot like a corant does today we're going to talk more about corant later we'll get back to them um and hesperornis actually had a close well not a close relative but there was a another uh species that wasn't too distantly related from it in its environment and that was ichorous also found all over North America now hesperornis was flightless and a diving bird ichorous actually would have looked like a seagull if you saw it here today the only difference is that ich orus if you looked very closely had teeth still in its Bill all right and then after ichorous that's when we start to get into the cazic radiation of birds and where we actually get into the things that that biologists are willing to call aies okay so this is the mesic radiation of birds and in the anoran if you saw them you would probably think that they look a lot like modern like sparrows and stuff they were really small they would have been really feathered they would been flitting and flying everywhere but they would have if you looked very closely they had teeth and Claws still um and has B would have probably and if the or would have probably look like seabirds that you know that that you see today as well now this lineage here this lineage the the uh a good early representative of this lineage um well let's get into it so aies so the aies really kind of splits off into two different groups okay one is the paleo naths and the other is the neon Nats all right you're probably sitting here thinking okay all right so the pths we we'll deal with those in a moment the neths uh the neths split up into two different groups and we'll call one the Gallow uh an aner and another group um we will call the Neo AES and if you know your greek latin you know I just said Gallow chicken so know that there's some chickens involved here that's right let's let's continue to follow the chickens let's see what's going on with them so within the Gallow anere we have asteras so this thing is also found with hpus and eoris so on The Shores At The Great Inland Sea of North America there was a thing that looked like a seagull there was a diving bird that was flightless and looked like um a corant and there was Aster orus that not only looked kind of like a chicken it actually was in fact an early relative of chickens there's this thing with paleontology where you're like well that was that thing but that looked like this thing but it was not actually that thing right we're constantly know that was like a seal but it wasn't actually a seal that was a penguin it wasn't actually a penguin Etc no this was a chicken that actually happened to be closely related to the thing we think about as chickens and so it had a a long neck and a big head and a kind of really dumpy looking beak actually all right so there's aorus for us and this actually starts to tell us something okay you might notice that I've kind of passed over some different groups over here paleon we're going to come back to they're still around today um uh and Neo avies we're going to come back to that's most of the birds when you think about birds all right and we're going to get back to what else is in this group other than chickens which I have said very vaguely is in this group the thing is is that you can kind of tell that there's kind of some missing Evolution here right there's not mentioning anything about fossils like early paleognaths or early ancestral neths right so there's some fossil record that isn't here there's species that weren't really being captured by the fossil record and when you look at aorus it's not kind of too hard to figure it out they were little terrestrial um uh birds that probably lived in little Burrows and came out and pecked at seeds and stuff and and small um prey and astr orinus was probably really well adapted to liveware you know we tend to think of as um you know uh PE fowl and um uh uh partridges and other sorts of small um terrestrial birds live today which is often very AR environments often these are not places where we're getting a lot of sedimentation often they are not places that are great at preserving small animals this is probably you know we're lucky to have an astero orus in the fossil record all right it's actually very pretty rare even though it occurs with hper orus the orus right um and so probably there was a whole bunch of evolution going on back here but it doesn't show up in that fossil record there was a whole bunch of probably species as this stuff was uh splitting apart all right um and we know that there was flight even though this thing was on the ground it probably flew and could fly it just probably doesn't like flying um that's seems to be a thing of a lot of the birds that ended up Surviving the mass extinction okay I'm going to put a k here that's for Cretaceous remember because the Cretaceous means clay Rich which in German starts with a K okay that's why it's a k so aorus is sister to a split and that splits into two different groups those two groups you are already very familiar with one we can call basically the galliforms and that is you know chickens and turkeys they're galliforms this group over here this is some um uh Birds you're already familiar with that's the ancera fores and what's that group best known as that's the water follow group or as you might already know it it's the ducks and geese for me I feel like that this works out rather nicely I'm like oh yes ducks chickens they're closely related to each other that kind of my brain likes that idea very much but it gets a little weirder okay so um what we're going to do here we're going to uh uh zoom in on this part of the tree so we're going to use some magic now to erase some of this stuff and we're going to add in a little bit more of a tree and then I'm going to add some labels to it one two Okay so we can see here that uh uh We've uh redone things a little bit we've sort stretched out the tree here's our incer forms down here there's our ducks ducks and I've added a few more nodes onto this tree here okay so we're going to we're zooming in on this Branch because there's actually quite a fossil record here going from the split between chickens to ducks ducks have quite a fossil record it turns out because it's a heck of a lot more than Ducks all right so the first group that splits off here that we think the we think these are related to to to the overall water fowl group they're called the pelor nith what are the pelor nith I think that these would be best referred to as false tooth birds and in fact this group is really interesting because they are the largest flying birds that have ever existed the biggest of them had a six meter wingspan even even on a even on a even in this smaller species were as small as the biggest albatrosses are today um and they they were gigantic and as you might guess from the name so even though by this point by AES really birds have lost no teeth there's no more teeth anymore after a okay and you can see all sorts of splitting has occurred well the false teethed Birds said nah and they re-evolved sort of like teeth like projections on their beak which were kind of I we think kind of the U made of like a hollow sort of bone that they kind of projected from their beak and this Beak was probably used that we think that the teeth were were not very like tough in so like if they were trying to eat something hard they probably would have broken so they was probably eating like soft prey like like squid or uh uh um uh squid or jellyfish something like that now um if you had SE if you go to the museum and you see one of these your mind will start to think man that looks a lot like a parasaur and in fact the proportions of these things is a lot like a Pteranodon now this group it really takes off right after the Cretaceous mass extinction all right and they are around up until you're not going to believe this they were up up around until about 2.5 million years ago at least 2.5 million years ago maybe even more recently they definitely would have overlapped with the um first hominids and the development of like Stone technology all right they were going pretty well it it appears they were living globally that they just that the this the whole group just declined and crashed because they couldn't deal with whatever oceanographic changes came with the glaciations of the place toy which was that long interval of of um ice and then melting and then ice and then melting that occurred for a few for like the last few million years so um that's what happened to our wonderful fth Birds the biggest flying birds that ever existed okay and that was in Morocco but they're known from all over the world because of course they were ginormous and they could fly everywhere so you find them everywhere um we haven't found any of their roosting spots which is actually a really interesting question because we know that seabirds today will hold on to those spots for like really long periods of time and and then there's a rich deposit of um dead baby birds eggshells and Etc that are then at that location so people are really looking for the the nesting areas for these guys um one place that people have been looking is West Virginia actually they think that they might because there's a few a few false tooth bird fossils have been found there and so people might think maybe there's more um okay so that's the pelor the day there's we're not out of surprises yet and those are distant duck cousins even more closely related to Ducks all right you're not going to believe this guest ornus and you're probably like guest ornus what is guest orus okay guest orus guest orus was a 2 m tall 386 PB um uh a bird you've often seen it in art it's the giant bird eating little tiny Dawn horses right so this thing shows up in the Paleo scene all right right after the the mass extinction and it's a giant terrestrial flightless bird with this big head um that you know is probably taller than me and eating these tiny horses okay now this is somewhat a myth okay because why do I say it's a kind of a myth because we now know looking at the the beak of gorus and looking at um uh Clues left behind on the fossils of gastornis that it was actually a giant herois bird so right after the Dinosaurs the the non-avian dinosaurs go out they take off and basically if you take aorus and you just make it look really big looks just like a gas orus I was actually kind of struck by it earlier today when I was looking at a picture of it um and then we go into this group The drow Mor nith also known as the Mii rungs now you might say to yourself okay what is that group well that group was even bigger all right again terrestrial flightless they lived in Australia where they were um where one appellation for them is that they are the demon Ducks the miir runs is actually a word from um uh indigenous Aboriginal um populations because in fact the Mii runs overlapped with Aboriginal people in Australia um and they are depicted in Ancient Art um that clearly be they were a lot bigger than the the other flightless bird of Australia which is the Emu um and uh they were they could be as big as 3 m the biggest um drum moreth 3 m tall which is like 9 ft tall so even bigger than guest ornus the supposed horse eater um uh and so they went extinct around 50,000 years ago I think it says something about Aboriginal culture that not only has art of these things survived 50,000 years but the stories of the Mii runs and the word has has survived that really makes you think doesn't it there's no pieces of writing from Europe or China or anywhere in the world that survived that long all right so um that's that's the crazy story of the Ducks and then we've got the VV which possibly they looked kind of like loons lonik if you don't know what a loon is you should look up a picture of a loon right now it kind of like ducks and seabirds kind of cross together but anyway the thing about the VV is that we think there's a v that shows up in the Cretaceous so all of this gets pushed back to the Cretaceous right so the the seeds of all these splits have to go all the way back there the ancestors they have to go all the way back to the Cretaceous I'm kind of pointing back here because right this is the 8S but this thing's in the Cretaceous and we think that those might have been in the Cretaceous as well it's kind of goes back and forth um uh so that really Alters our view of um of how much bird Evolution must have occurred back in the Cretaceous and you know we still haven't covered the stories of what's going with the pths or the Neo AES all we've done is cover that Gallow an um all right I'd like to catch you up on the PS so we're going to take another um I think we'll actually just take a break now we'll do the next video we'll start off with the next video and we will start off with the paleon naths and then go to the newo A