A photo of the fossil (top) and digital brain reconstruction (bottom) of the toothy Cretaceous bird Ichthyornis. (Image credit: Torres et al; CC BY 4.0)
Live Science has a story about the survival of the birds across the K-Pg boundary. A paper in the journal Science Advances looks at brain size of a fossil birds and theorizes that was a factor that helped them survive.
When the dinosaur-killing asteroid collided with Earth about 66 million years ago, it triggered a slew of horrific events — shockwaves, wildfires, acid rain, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions and nuclear winter-like conditions — that killed about 80% of all animal species. But, mysteriously, some dinosaurs survived: the birds.
But why did some lineages of birds endure, while others perished? New research on a well-preserved ancient bird skull suggests that the bird species that survived the cataclysm had bigger cerebrums, or forebrains — the front region of the brain.
Although it's not clear exactly how larger forebrains helped birds survive, as the forebrain is responsible for many processes, "it likely had to do with behavioral plasticity — the birds with bigger forebrains could probably modify their own behavior quickly enough to keep up with how quickly their environment was changing," study lead researcher Chris Torres, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral research fellow in the Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine at Ohio University, told Live Science in an email.
