This episode is brought to you by the Music for Scientists album! Stream the album on major music services here: streamlink.to/music-for-scientists. Check out “The Idea” music video here: th-cam.com/video/tUyT94aGmbc/w-d-xo.html.
I was once part of an expedition to the island of Mauritius. There were reports that the extinct dodo bird had been spotted. We kept finding evidence of a large bird, but in the end it turned out to just be a wild goose chase.
@@Vulpio7775 actually there are plenty of extinct Pseudosuchids(maternal clade of all crocodilians) that were most likely feathered as well. So, no, not all of the feathered beasts are dinos.
"our ancestors had emerged from the sea and conquered the land. Today, I have invented flight!" "... nah ... let's go back to the water and do submarine mode"
Once, birds are larger things than worms, but they all died when God hit the queue ball into the Eight Ball in an inter-dimensional game of pool. At least according to Douglas Adams.
"It seems a little odd now, but flightless mega-birds have been a winning strategy for tens of millions of years." Yeah, it seems like Australia can witness to that.
Flying requires so much energy, and so much food to provide that energy, that in the absence of large mammal predators birds frequently return to flightless phylogeny. Australia's microclimates tended to discourage large mammal predators, and natural selection was biased towards larger, faster and fiercer birds too big or fast for smaller predators to overpower.
@Mullerornis Technically large bids quickly filled in the vacant niches after the K-Pg extinction with large flightless birds evolving on all continents the majority of these birds were members of the Paleognathes an ancient lineage of ground nesting birds that split off from other birds in the Early Cretaceous. In birds at least compared to surviving mammals larger body size is actually to some degree an ancestral condition that they were preadapted for as birds are a lineage of dinosaurs after all. Mammals wouldn't get really big until the latter half of the Cenozoic a possibility largely opened up as lower temperatures favor larger body sizes also it might be a contributing factor that the large predatory crocodyliforms that dominated the apex predator roles in the early Cenozoic were increasingly restricted in range by dropping temperatures.
@Mullerornis well yes of course there are exceptions and things are quite complicated in terms of the details but we are talking statistical averages there were lots of lineages evolving new adaptations in the post extinction environment.
"Gastornis has such an unusual skull, that for a long time paleontologists weren't sure what they ate." Sitting on the toilet at 5 am watching this video, I honestly thought he meant paleontologists ate one and were confused about what kind of bird they had just eaten... then I realized how silly that sounded.
@@chan-bch.6833 They're 2 different creatures, actually. Archy's are the ones that help you glide when you carry them. Mictoraptors are the assholes who ruin a good scouting trip.
@@AaronSaysSKOL and Hesperornis (and/or Ichthyornis) is the jackass that steals the meat/narcotics (I think they can steal narcos... may be wrong) that you were about to force feed to a Spinosaurus and now you have to run to base to get more... only to find that Spino awake and is now chasing you back to base and I'll stop there lol what were we talking about?! Oh yeah; f**k the ARK seagulls!!
Miller Riddell : perseverance is in the very best spot. A crater(Jezero) in a river delta and the crater became a lake. Plenty of juicy stuff there for sure.
Then you have the Hoatzins, which are the only extant modern bird that still retains functional clawed wings (at least as juveniles). They lose these features in adulthood however.
This is exactly what Archeops did to Pokémon. The line are not called "first bird Pokémon" for nothing, especially since the fossil that revives into Archen is called the plume fossil, referring to the feathers.
Can you do the evolution of swine? A friend and I hit a dead end when looking them up and I really hate that lol. I want to know the in-between ancestors.
Yeah microraptor is fascinating though it should be noted that microraptor and its kin were around for such a long time period so there probably wasn't just one microraptor. Interestingly evidence has built up that within the microraptor lineage of dromaeosaurs true powered flight independently arose so while many species of microraptor were just gliding animals by the later half of the Cretaceous they too had evolved powered flight based on the skeletal morphology indicating powerful muscles capable of supporting powered flight and gut contents that are hard to reconcile with a gliding life style such as fish and birds in environments that didn't support the large trees or cliffs gliders would need to glide. There is even more recent work showing that within Paravians powered flight may have evolved convergently as many as 4 times possibly more. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.046169v1.full And yes microraptors were dromaeosaurs so this means there were flying dromaeosaurs though they were only about the size of a crow with a diet consisting of small vertebrates fish, lizards & birds based on fossil got contents so I wouldn't be surprised if mammals were also on their menu. ;)
Chicken embryo grow teeth but in the late stage of development the teeth get covered by the beak. The chemical makeup of feathers is also close to scales and they found the gene responsible for it. We could easily manipulate bird dna to have teeth and scales
I usually have that, “wow, has it really been 10 minutes already?” feel from these videos, but this one definitely takes the cake. So much crazy cool stuff, it honestly felt like 5- 6 minutes- tops
Regarding the thing about the big legs: Some birds like swifts for example don't rely on their legs as much like other birds. To my knowledge, swifts can't take of from the ground and rather jump of some elevated place. Could even bigger birds evolve if they had a similar lifestyle?
That's the most plucked archaeopteryx I've ever seen in an illustration..no wonder he looks a bit pissed, or maybe he's just dancing, trying to stay warm...you know, because of the whole "plucking" situation. Cheers :)
Beaks are cheaper to produce than teeth. That's why they exist. They're a little lighter than teeth, which may be why they're favored by birds.. since flying is very hard, and anything unnecessary and heavy can be prone to being lost.
@Wattle Yes, I wonder how many reptiles use gizzards. Probably not as many. Because the weight of teeth may be easily replaced by swallowed stones, I suspect the costly nature of producing teeth may be the more likely origin of beaks. Especially since we see it in turtles who mass spawn, and even most mammals are born without teeth, and we usually have to put a lot of work into rearing young. Beak gets you into the game fast.
It's very intriguing why only neornithine birds have survived the K-T extinctions, and no enantiornithe at all. More intriguing than even why crocs still are around. It makes it seem like the non-croc and non-neornithe intermediates were all in some sort of disadvantage (or sets of disadvantages) for the extinction scenario.
No. Plancton is not a Taxonomic group of animals It is more like a way of life in the ocean. They includ all microscopic live beings that live fluctuating and carried by the tides. Phytoplancton are those who are photosyntetic and zooplancton i think a manly composed by animals, this includ even crustaceans larvae.
You could call them that, yes! All the Mesozoic species mentioned in this video are side branches of a general 'trend' towards modern birds, though, not direct ancestors. But I suppose that still counts.
Their mammalian bone structures are their only limiting factor (mind that their bones are not hollow like birds nor have air sac in it, only thin) The largest hypothetical bats that can still fly could probably never reached the size of even a medium-sized pterosaurs, unless they become semi-terrestrial or completely flightless
I find it funny noticing that every major animal group (maybe being a little too vague) has had a time where it defined the period. And the versions that stuck around were often not why they originally evolved nor the most common type. I feel non-human mammals might be most likely to live on in the water. Whales and dolphins are extremely good at being underwater predators. Breaking records for the largest ever.
And then they get too specialized and an extinction event happens and most or all of them die and a new age begins. And a new lifeform starts radiating and specializing in different niches and boom new apex predator. Makes me wonder about humans tbh. We're the only branch left on our tree. We've triggered mass extinctions. What next?
How 'bout the truly bizarre (by modern standards) bird-like dinosaurs which had feathers, yet flew on wings of stretched skin like bats? *Ambopteryx longibrachium* was a member of the *Scansoriopterygidae* clade, which lived about 163 Million years ago in the Jurassic.
Those "bird-like-dinosaurs" you're talking about aren't scientifically dinosaurs. you're talking about pterosaurs, that evolutionarily don't belong to the dinosaurs. Real bird-like dinosaurs are dromaesaurids like velociraptor etc. They didn't have bat like wings, they had feathers that were really similar to normal bird's wings.
@@bm-ub6zc Actually, if you clicked "read more" you'd see they're not talking about pterosaurs, they are talking about scansoriopterygids which are in fact, dinosaurs. These creatures were dinosaurs with feathers, but also skin wings.
The Music For Scientists album cover art looks like the moment you turn off clipping in a video game.... or when the cid kicks in harder than you were expecting
I was about to post just about exactly that comment. Bigger wings need bigger legs need bigger wings... probably goes by the natural log... yup, rocket equation for modern dinosaurs.
@@Archgeek0 Yeah it really is a good comparison though not quite exact but I hadn't thought of it in this terms. The main difference here is that the muscles are basically acting as the rocket fuel in this analogy releasing stored potential energy. In summary bipedalism and flight don't mix very well if large sizes are your objective both pterosaurs and bats are quadrupedal which means they have less difficulty getting off the ground for bigger sizes though bats due to being mammals lack the hollow bones and more efficient respiratory system of archosaurs and thus have a smaller max body size . They are actually mostly constrained by ecological limits as the bat body plan appears to work without problem up towards 3 meter wingspan in principal.
There's Limenavis (threshold bird), which is placed just outside the crown modern birds. Someone ought to find a bird in a harbor and name it Limenornis, just to confuse people.
2:13 "Dudes! Check it out. I'm gonna lay down in this position that they'll call 'cartoon like,' whatever that means, millions of years from now." "Ummm, what's a year?"
It's stunning to realize that everything living, including us. Are nothing more than random mutations generated by evolutionary processes over millions of years.
The problem is, birds never stopped being dinosaurs, they just gradually became more bird-like, and also there wasn't really a first of anything, because that isn't how evolution or natural selection works.
Yes, long tails do help in stabilization, but at the expense of maneuverability. It's been hypothesized that pterosaurs that did not have long tails compensated with larger brains to help compute maneuverability quickly. In modern aircraft we can build planes with no tail only because of computers to help to steer and balance the plane.
I am hearing a bunch of data and supposition on these early birds, is there a similar compilation of data on the Worm? Keep up the awesome work SciShow!!!
I would guess "evolved flightlessness approximately 150 times" and "beefy back legs" are pretty strongly related. Flight is useful but not necessary to make a bird viable, hence the wide range of birds both with and without it. With a puh-terosaur, what else are you going to make out of that body BESIDES a flying thing? I guess there are ocean rays with a kind of similar silhouette, but even those have a really different body plan.
Love me some paraves and avealans, even if I kind of feel like paraves is the better clade to think with, because they're the ones where you have super birdlike but weird animals, but also here you can almost see like. Alternate universe birds that get really weird while being so extremely bird like I think of them almost as birds.
Stefan is funny and looks like he has been lifting weights. I learned a lot from this video about crown birds since the mass extinction event and the explanation as to why crown birds are limited in size is interesting.
@@oleksandrbyelyenko435 Its not. By taxonomic definition and evolution. A descendant of a group doesnt have to belong into its parent group (as a whole) if it loses the traits required for the parent group (aka if it evolved into a, this case, different class). Mammals and birds arent reptiles, reptiles arent amphibians, amphibians arent fish, etc. By pure cladistics (aka without restraining groups by functional shared traits) EVERYTHING is a bacteria and the very point of taxonomy in the first place goes out of the window.
@2:39 ".... would been hard to tell apart from their closest dinosaur cousins....." I think it would be rather the otherway around, so dinosaurs were so birdlike that at first glance you would experience them as birds. Of course not the big Tyrannosaurs and such but more smaller raptorial ones.
The dino/bird distinction is so blurry now that some paleontologists have theorized that possibly some Velociraptor-related dinosaurs, maybe including Velociraptors themselves, and their bigger cousins, Deinonichus (the ones from Jurassic Park), were really the first flightless birds, having had ancient flying birds more like Archaeopteryx in their ancestry. There was at least one cladistic analysis (Mayr, 2005) that had Archaeopteryx as more basal/ancestral than those dinosaurs, making them really the first flightless birds.
The line between what is a bird and what isn't is immensly blurry and i'm glad this video is out there to talk about it in a way so eady to understand. The fact that there's still people today who think birds and non avian dinosaurs were two drastically different things is outrageous, not on them, but on the fact that pop culture and saltlords on the internet keep spreading misinformation to keep the idea that dinosaur = monster well alive in people's minds, all for profit or just self validation, and JW: Dominion, with it's immensly half-assed broken wristed, parrot-like giant pyroraptor, and ARK 2 with it's claim of "hyper realistic dinosaurs", are just proof that companies won't stop beating that long fossilized horse as long as people get more accessible "informations" from idiots who still simp the isle rather than from videos like these which actually care about the matter at hand. It's so hard to get into paleontology because of the overwhelming ammount of misinformation out there that's falsly veiled as legit because a lot of people say it, or the person saying it is famous (:cough: tierzoo :cough:), and i'm very thankful for videos like this that bring actual good information in a great format and to a wider audience. :^)
Unlikely however swifts are fascinating however as research via trackers shows swifts eat & sleep on the wing all the time with tracked birds never landing or even getting close to the ground except for when it becomes time to raise babies which kind of needs them to land since eggs cant fly. So they are quite literally the most aerial adapted organisms we know of. This is likely why they have small feet they almost never land if swifts were able to adapt to have live young able to fly at birth they probably would lose their legs all together as swifts only ever land to make a nest and raise their babies. However yeah if swifts were able to evolve a way around the needs to breed on the ground limit that constrains swift size they could in principal grow as big as their food source (flying insects) permits
07:53 OK, I thought, NZ's gonna get a mention here, we have LOTs of flightless birds, but sadly, no. Not even a joke about our flightless fuzzy fruit, the Kiwi.
This episode is brought to you by the Music for Scientists album! Stream the album on major music services here: streamlink.to/music-for-scientists. Check out “The Idea” music video here: th-cam.com/video/tUyT94aGmbc/w-d-xo.html.
8
Are phytoplanktons and zooplanktons closely related to each-other, as per their family trees? Make a video on this topic.
The largest flying bird is an Albatros?
What about Condors?
How about music BY scientists ?
Quetzalcoatlus: lol, u so smol.
Bird: Damn these drumsticks.
Unless you are referring to the feathered serpent god of Central & South American tribals, I believe you are missing an "-us" at the end of that.
@@Samael1113
*facepalm* You're right. Fixed.
Bird: You are a bird-wannabe.
Quetzalcoatlus: I came first, you idiot.
I was once part of an expedition to the island of Mauritius. There were reports that the extinct dodo bird had been spotted.
We kept finding evidence of a large bird, but in the end it turned out to just be a wild goose chase.
D'oh d'oh
Nice to have seen you again!
"Stop, Dad. Just stop." :)
Just imagine all the worms these early birds would've caught.
the pun master is back
The way to tell if they are early birds or dinosaurs is whether they got the worm... The early bird gets the worm.
Enough jokes dad
You are under remote arrest for verbal abuse. ;)
Are you my stepdad?
@@katyungodly That's up to your mama.
Early bird gets the worm, but late mouse gets the cheese :)
To avoid confusion, just call every feathered beastie a dinosaur.
And yet, there are feathered pterosaurs. In fact, crocodilians even have a gene in their embryonic stage coding for feather growth.
@@Vulpio7775 actually there are plenty of extinct Pseudosuchids(maternal clade of all crocodilians) that were most likely feathered as well. So, no, not all of the feathered beasts are dinos.
Basically my pet chickens
Better still, call all tetrapods fish
Plumed rhinos?
"our ancestors had emerged from the sea and conquered the land. Today, I have invented flight!"
"... nah ... let's go back to the water and do submarine mode"
From now on I will refer to birds as 'non-opposite birds,' just to see how people react.
Please report!
Opposite-opposite birds
Call you a dork
I'm irritated about it.
The non-opposite avian dinosaurs of the Cenozoic era.
To assess if a “bird” is “early”
...one must simply ask whether it got the worm 🪱 or not
Once, birds are larger things than worms, but they all died when God hit the queue ball into the Eight Ball in an inter-dimensional game of pool. At least according to Douglas Adams.
"It seems a little odd now, but flightless mega-birds have been a winning strategy for tens of millions of years."
Yeah, it seems like Australia can witness to that.
Flying requires so much energy, and so much food to provide that energy, that in the absence of large mammal predators birds frequently return to flightless phylogeny. Australia's microclimates tended to discourage large mammal predators, and natural selection was biased towards larger, faster and fiercer birds too big or fast for smaller predators to overpower.
Aside from the war which I won't mention for our Aussie friends' sake, cassowaries are also proof of birds' descendance from dinosaurs
@@ogorangeduck *t-rex noises*
@Mullerornis Technically large bids quickly filled in the vacant niches after the K-Pg extinction with large flightless birds evolving on all continents the majority of these birds were members of the Paleognathes an ancient lineage of ground nesting birds that split off from other birds in the Early Cretaceous. In birds at least compared to surviving mammals larger body size is actually to some degree an ancestral condition that they were preadapted for as birds are a lineage of dinosaurs after all. Mammals wouldn't get really big until the latter half of the Cenozoic a possibility largely opened up as lower temperatures favor larger body sizes also it might be a contributing factor that the large predatory crocodyliforms that dominated the apex predator roles in the early Cenozoic were increasingly restricted in range by dropping temperatures.
@Mullerornis well yes of course there are exceptions and things are quite complicated in terms of the details but we are talking statistical averages there were lots of lineages evolving new adaptations in the post extinction environment.
"Gastornis has such an unusual skull, that for a long time paleontologists weren't sure what they ate."
Sitting on the toilet at 5 am watching this video, I honestly thought he meant paleontologists ate one and were confused about what kind of bird they had just eaten... then I realized how silly that sounded.
same
To be fair, that's basically human history in a nutshell: "Don't know what this is exactly, but I'll try it, it could be tasty."
As someone with 1600+ hours in ARK, this episode was incredible to see so many dinosaurs I knew about! Thanks Sci-Show!
I drop ARK less than one hour gameplay :/
As an ARK player seeing both hesperonis and pelagornis in one video fills my heart
Same!
Don't forget about the Archy. Lol
@@AaronSaysSKOL I think we can all try and forget the microraptor
@@chan-bch.6833 They're 2 different creatures, actually. Archy's are the ones that help you glide when you carry them. Mictoraptors are the assholes who ruin a good scouting trip.
@@AaronSaysSKOL and Hesperornis (and/or Ichthyornis) is the jackass that steals the meat/narcotics (I think they can steal narcos... may be wrong) that you were about to force feed to a Spinosaurus and now you have to run to base to get more... only to find that Spino awake and is now chasing you back to base and I'll stop there lol
what were we talking about?! Oh yeah; f**k the ARK seagulls!!
Just imagine the fossils we haven't found yet.
EXACTLY!
Or the ones we will never find.
@@Boogaboioringale yeah, or the ones that have disintigrated.
Miller Riddell : perseverance is in the very best spot. A crater(Jezero) in a river delta and the crater became a lake. Plenty of juicy stuff there for sure.
Fossilized tanks!
Imagine if birds still had grasping hands on the ends of their wings
*Every Australian who has angered a magpie*
Hoatzin: Am I a joke to you?
Jokes aside, only Hoatzin chicks still have the claws in its arms present,..
A lot of birds still have a claw on their wing for climbing.
@@justsomehaatonpassingby4488 So do chickens
Crows would be even better at tool use probably.
Our birds, in all their diversity, are only the re-grown branches off of a once much larger tree of life
Exactly. Every species only has 1 common ancestor.
Then you have the Hoatzins, which are the only extant modern bird that still retains functional clawed wings (at least as juveniles). They lose these features in adulthood however.
At least some ratites retain tiny claws in the adult form. Ostriches do.
Ostriches have them too
@@DasDuken emus too
I missed a word. I meant to say functional claws. Fixing
@@kalanivernon7273 Turacos are said to have them too although I haven't found any images
It's so cool that many of the names here made sense after watching the PBS Eons video "when birds had teeth" :D
Lol yeah
I am yet again in awe of the beauty and diversity of life on Earth. I really wish we could interact with some of these bizarre ancient birds.
This is exactly what Archeops did to Pokémon. The line are not called "first bird Pokémon" for nothing, especially since the fossil that revives into Archen is called the plume fossil, referring to the feathers.
That was...pretty good, scishow.
Possibly one of the most information-dense videos I’ve watched in quite a while
Ostriches and penguins really stretch the definition of "bird" as well. It's not just the extinct varieties.
Kiwi birds, too. They're sometimes referred to as an "honorary mammal."
Anyone who thinks Feathered Dinosaurs aren’t terrifying have never seen an ostrich
@@janmelantu7490 or an eagle.
Can you do the evolution of swine? A friend and I hit a dead end when looking them up and I really hate that lol. I want to know the in-between ancestors.
Look up whale and hippo, close relatives.
@@annaclarafenyo8185 yeah 😊Oh seals and bears are related distantly
You had me at "Four-winged Microraptor"
Yeah microraptor is fascinating though it should be noted that microraptor and its kin were around for such a long time period so there probably wasn't just one microraptor.
Interestingly evidence has built up that within the microraptor lineage of dromaeosaurs true powered flight independently arose so while many species of microraptor were just gliding animals by the later half of the Cretaceous they too had evolved powered flight based on the skeletal morphology indicating powerful muscles capable of supporting powered flight and gut contents that are hard to reconcile with a gliding life style such as fish and birds in environments that didn't support the large trees or cliffs gliders would need to glide. There is even more recent work showing that within Paravians powered flight may have evolved convergently as many as 4 times possibly more. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.17.046169v1.full
And yes microraptors were dromaeosaurs so this means there were flying dromaeosaurs though they were only about the size of a crow with a diet consisting of small vertebrates fish, lizards & birds based on fossil got contents so I wouldn't be surprised if mammals were also on their menu. ;)
@@Dragrath1 Geezzuss! Are you a student of Paleontology or just obsessed with it?
Chicken embryo grow teeth but in the late stage of development the teeth get covered by the beak. The chemical makeup of feathers is also close to scales and they found the gene responsible for it. We could easily manipulate bird dna to have teeth and scales
There was a study making proto-feathers in alligator embryos.
Stefan's not just one of my favourite SciShow hosts.
Stefan's one of my favourite educational content hosts on TH-cam.
This was a enlightening episode. Thank you!
I usually have that, “wow, has it really been 10 minutes already?” feel from these videos, but this one definitely takes the cake. So much crazy cool stuff, it honestly felt like 5- 6 minutes- tops
Regarding the thing about the big legs: Some birds like swifts for example don't rely on their legs as much like other birds. To my knowledge, swifts can't take of from the ground and rather jump of some elevated place. Could even bigger birds evolve if they had a similar lifestyle?
Yay keep rocking the science! Thank you very much 🤣😂🤣😂
Really I just like this channel so much ☺️😉😁
Yes, totally awesome videos with a very easy presenter to listen to.
Yess I love topics like this.
Edit: and these longer videos give me life. Love you guys!
I love how all the Ark players emerge in the comments on dinosaur videos ♡♡
It’s a blessing and a curse. It gets annoying seeing them label a creature that isn’t the right one
That's the most plucked archaeopteryx I've ever seen in an illustration..no wonder he looks a bit pissed, or maybe he's just dancing, trying to stay warm...you know, because of the whole "plucking" situation. Cheers :)
I still need to know more about beaks
Beaks are cheaper to produce than teeth. That's why they exist.
They're a little lighter than teeth, which may be why they're favored by birds.. since flying is very hard, and anything unnecessary and heavy can be prone to being lost.
@Wattle Yes, I wonder how many reptiles use gizzards. Probably not as many.
Because the weight of teeth may be easily replaced by swallowed stones, I suspect the costly nature of producing teeth may be the more likely origin of beaks. Especially since we see it in turtles who mass spawn, and even most mammals are born without teeth, and we usually have to put a lot of work into rearing young. Beak gets you into the game fast.
It's very intriguing why only neornithine birds have survived the K-T extinctions, and no enantiornithe at all. More intriguing than even why crocs still are around. It makes it seem like the non-croc and non-neornithe intermediates were all in some sort of disadvantage (or sets of disadvantages) for the extinction scenario.
It has come to my attention the Bird is the Word.
Are phytoplanktons and zooplanktons closely related to each-other, as per their family trees? Make a video on this topic.
No. Plancton is not a Taxonomic group of animals It is more like a way of life in the ocean. They includ all microscopic live beings that live fluctuating and carried by the tides. Phytoplancton are those who are photosyntetic and zooplancton i think a manly composed by animals, this includ even crustaceans larvae.
I’ve said it before but it’s uncanny how similar all the different hosts sound on this show. Good episode
The definition of transitional species.
You could call them that, yes! All the Mesozoic species mentioned in this video are side branches of a general 'trend' towards modern birds, though, not direct ancestors. But I suppose that still counts.
The last bit made me wonder... Bats have the same method of takeoff as pterosaurs had, so what is limiting their size?
Their mammalian bone structures are their only limiting factor (mind that their bones are not hollow like birds nor have air sac in it, only thin)
The largest hypothetical bats that can still fly could probably never reached the size of even a medium-sized pterosaurs, unless they become semi-terrestrial or completely flightless
I like this video format.
Giving a brief overview of an entire evolutionary tree.
I find it funny noticing that every major animal group (maybe being a little too vague) has had a time where it defined the period. And the versions that stuck around were often not why they originally evolved nor the most common type.
I feel non-human mammals might be most likely to live on in the water. Whales and dolphins are extremely good at being underwater predators. Breaking records for the largest ever.
And then they get too specialized and an extinction event happens and most or all of them die and a new age begins. And a new lifeform starts radiating and specializing in different niches and boom new apex predator. Makes me wonder about humans tbh. We're the only branch left on our tree. We've triggered mass extinctions. What next?
How 'bout the truly bizarre (by modern standards) bird-like dinosaurs which had feathers, yet flew on wings of stretched skin like bats?
*Ambopteryx longibrachium* was a member of the *Scansoriopterygidae* clade, which lived about 163 Million years ago in the Jurassic.
Yes! I wish they'd do an episode on these, I can't find much info on them.
Those "bird-like-dinosaurs" you're talking about aren't scientifically dinosaurs. you're talking about pterosaurs, that evolutionarily don't belong to the dinosaurs.
Real bird-like dinosaurs are dromaesaurids like velociraptor etc. They didn't have bat like wings, they had feathers that were really similar to normal bird's wings.
@@bm-ub6zc Actually, if you clicked "read more" you'd see they're not talking about pterosaurs, they are talking about scansoriopterygids which are in fact, dinosaurs. These creatures were dinosaurs with feathers, but also skin wings.
So... Who is making a Opposite Bird Kids Book? Give me a shout out if you do :-)
SciShow: So. You think you know what a bird is...
*Me, looking at my parrot* : Yes
Birds are so cool.
Avian dino power!
The Music For Scientists album cover art looks like the moment you turn off clipping in a video game.... or when the cid kicks in harder than you were expecting
Scishow: "Here's some weird extinct birds"
Me, who knows the Screamer is currently alive: "Aren't we already weird enough?"
At 9:40 -- So ancient birds were also prey to the Tyranny of the Rocket Equation? ;)
Nice.
I was about to post just about exactly that comment. Bigger wings need bigger legs need bigger wings... probably goes by the natural log... yup, rocket equation for modern dinosaurs.
@@Archgeek0 Yeah it really is a good comparison though not quite exact but I hadn't thought of it in this terms. The main difference here is that the muscles are basically acting as the rocket fuel in this analogy releasing stored potential energy. In summary bipedalism and flight don't mix very well if large sizes are your objective both pterosaurs and bats are quadrupedal which means they have less difficulty getting off the ground for bigger sizes though bats due to being mammals lack the hollow bones and more efficient respiratory system of archosaurs and thus have a smaller max body size . They are actually mostly constrained by ecological limits as the bat body plan appears to work without problem up towards 3 meter wingspan in principal.
Ba ba ba bird bird bird - bird is the word.
No, go sit in a corner
I can't get the Ann Margret song out of my head, damn Mad Men
This is the best and certainly the most complete video about birds I have ever come across....and is likely to ever come across in the future.
There's Limenavis (threshold bird), which is placed just outside the crown modern birds. Someone ought to find a bird in a harbor and name it Limenornis, just to confuse people.
These birds legit sound like and look like Pokemon.
They should make a pokedex just with dinosaurs and in the traditional pokemon artstyle.
I'll just be disappointed now if dodrio doesn't get a water-type regional variant based on a hesperornis which has a new evolved form called hydrio.
My wife always says I’m a Great Bustard. Or something like that. We have a great relationship. Life goals
“Flightless mega-birds have been a winning strategy for tens of millions of years.”
Kiwis: can we get a new strategist?
2:13 "Dudes! Check it out. I'm gonna lay down in this position that they'll call 'cartoon like,' whatever that means, millions of years from now." "Ummm, what's a year?"
Somewhere in fossil heaven one guy is really offended by this! Cartoonlike??
"Sorry I didn't find a more adequate position TO DIE IN..."
@Scumfuck McDoucheface Name checks out...
Hesperornis combined the diving ability of Penguins, the fishing ability of Mergansers and the uselessness on land of Loons.
It's stunning to realize that everything living, including us. Are nothing more than random mutations generated by evolutionary processes over millions of years.
All I heard while watching this video, is that bird is the word.
The problem is, birds never stopped being dinosaurs, they just gradually became more bird-like, and also there wasn't really a first of anything, because that isn't how evolution or natural selection works.
Awesome episode 🐣
This is really pretty cool! I love science and and especially discussions regarding birds and dinosaur connections. Thanks!
The music collection, 'Music for Scientists', is quite good. I like it well.
It's well mixed. 'Alan Parsons level' mixed.
How is this the first I've ever heard of a raptor with four wings.
Remember the aggressiveness of geese. Now imagine a goose with a wingspan over six meters across.
Birds show why you don't skip a leg day.
Velociraptor was really made into an oversimplified logo
Long tails sometimes help kites fly better. The toy, not the bird. But maybe it worked the same way for the ancient birds
Yes, long tails do help in stabilization, but at the expense of maneuverability. It's been hypothesized that pterosaurs that did not have long tails compensated with larger brains to help compute maneuverability quickly.
In modern aircraft we can build planes with no tail only because of computers to help to steer and balance the plane.
Thanks for that idea. I never thought of that.
I am hearing a bunch of data and supposition on these early birds, is there a similar compilation of data on the Worm? Keep up the awesome work SciShow!!!
I would guess "evolved flightlessness approximately 150 times" and "beefy back legs" are pretty strongly related. Flight is useful but not necessary to make a bird viable, hence the wide range of birds both with and without it. With a puh-terosaur, what else are you going to make out of that body BESIDES a flying thing? I guess there are ocean rays with a kind of similar silhouette, but even those have a really different body plan.
Love me some paraves and avealans, even if I kind of feel like paraves is the better clade to think with, because they're the ones where you have super birdlike but weird animals, but also here you can almost see like. Alternate universe birds that get really weird while being so extremely bird like I think of them almost as birds.
Stefan is funny and looks like he has been lifting weights. I learned a lot from this video about crown birds since the mass extinction event and the explanation as to why crown birds are limited in size is interesting.
If they didn't name it "music for scientists" then I may have given it a listen already
"What ARE birds? We just don't know."
I for one am glad birds are no longer the size of pterosaurs
how y'all managed to talk about diving flightless birds and think to compare them to ducks instead of penguins is beyond me
In the Beginning was the Word. And the Bird was the Word.
So, what's the word?
Birb
Archaeopteryx is basically just a chill goose.
I was told that all birds are dinosaurs
The phrase "expanded universe of birds" has me laughing at the idea of NON-CANONICAL BIRDS
Just wait until Disney gets the rights to birds and makes their own canon
those are called nomen dubium.
I love this guys ears keep up the good content
When you understand that birds ARE dinosaurs, you don't care do they have teeth and other odd features.
All birds are dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs are birds
@@Indoraptoad that's true
@@oleksandrbyelyenko435 Its not. By taxonomic definition and evolution. A descendant of a group doesnt have to belong into its parent group (as a whole) if it loses the traits required for the parent group (aka if it evolved into a, this case, different class). Mammals and birds arent reptiles, reptiles arent amphibians, amphibians arent fish, etc.
By pure cladistics (aka without restraining groups by functional shared traits) EVERYTHING is a bacteria and the very point of taxonomy in the first place goes out of the window.
@2:39
".... would been hard to tell apart from their closest dinosaur cousins....."
I think it would be rather the otherway around, so dinosaurs were so birdlike that at first glance you would experience them as birds. Of course not the big Tyrannosaurs and such but more smaller raptorial ones.
Title: Is birb birb?
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's SUPERDINO!
The dino/bird distinction is so blurry now that some paleontologists have theorized that possibly some Velociraptor-related dinosaurs, maybe including Velociraptors themselves, and their bigger cousins, Deinonichus (the ones from Jurassic Park), were really the first flightless birds, having had ancient flying birds more like Archaeopteryx in their ancestry. There was at least one cladistic analysis (Mayr, 2005) that had Archaeopteryx as more basal/ancestral than those dinosaurs, making them really the first flightless birds.
5:52 if you grab its beak and close, does its legs come together like a claw machine?
Keep one of those birds in your car for when you're too far from the drive through window
The line between what is a bird and what isn't is immensly blurry and i'm glad this video is out there to talk about it in a way so eady to understand.
The fact that there's still people today who think birds and non avian dinosaurs were two drastically different things is outrageous, not on them, but on the fact that pop culture and saltlords on the internet keep spreading misinformation to keep the idea that dinosaur = monster well alive in people's minds, all for profit or just self validation, and JW: Dominion, with it's immensly half-assed broken wristed, parrot-like giant pyroraptor, and ARK 2 with it's claim of "hyper realistic dinosaurs", are just proof that companies won't stop beating that long fossilized horse as long as people get more accessible "informations" from idiots who still simp the isle rather than from videos like these which actually care about the matter at hand.
It's so hard to get into paleontology because of the overwhelming ammount of misinformation out there that's falsly veiled as legit because a lot of people say it, or the person saying it is famous (:cough: tierzoo :cough:), and i'm very thankful for videos like this that bring actual good information in a great format and to a wider audience. :^)
They be not birds, they be dragons laddie!
look up Yi qi. Those guys are definitely miniature wyverns.
If it floof, it birb.
It's true. In some cultures, a bird is considered a hairy reptile.
So toothed birds are as scarce as hen's teeth...
I have mad respect for penguins since I learned that they basically do the wall sit every time they walk around!
Not hard when their anatomy is designed around it.
Humans walk on 2 legs all the time. How weird is that for a mammal.
@@pepesylvia848
Sounds like some Australia-level weirdness, if you ask me ;P
@@jaschabull2365 Kangaroos are cheating since they stand on 3 limbs, but hop on 2!
The bird, bird, bird is the word.
Scientist: Bird is bird!
When did it go from 65 to 66 million years ago. Did I miss a million years, am I that old?
Maybe in a few million years, the Common swift and their relatives will grow large, as their feet are much smaller.
Unlikely however swifts are fascinating however as research via trackers shows swifts eat & sleep on the wing all the time with tracked birds never landing or even getting close to the ground except for when it becomes time to raise babies which kind of needs them to land since eggs cant fly. So they are quite literally the most aerial adapted organisms we know of. This is likely why they have small feet they almost never land if swifts were able to adapt to have live young able to fly at birth they probably would lose their legs all together as swifts only ever land to make a nest and raise their babies.
However yeah if swifts were able to evolve a way around the needs to breed on the ground limit that constrains swift size they could in principal grow as big as their food source (flying insects) permits
07:53 OK, I thought, NZ's gonna get a mention here, we have LOTs of flightless birds, but sadly, no. Not even a joke about our flightless fuzzy fruit, the Kiwi.
Hesperornis had to come to land at some point, to lay and hatch eggs. Chicks aren't born with gills...but it would be pretty cool if they were!
Really leaning into the music for scientists album.
Pretty sure scientists listen to Black Sabbath, guys.
Did it catch a worm? Then that’s a birb to me.