The ancestors of modern birds from among the dinosaurs survived the disaster that killed the rest of the lizards due to the fact that they learned to feed on seeds. This hypothesis was made by scientists, authors of an article in the journal Current Biology.
During the "nuclear winter" that followed the fall of a giant meteorite, sunlight hardly reached the Earth's surface, as a result of which the amount of plant biomass was sharply reduced, and herbivorous dinosaurs began to die out. They were followed by predatory lizards. However, enough seeds remained in the soil to feed the birds with toothless beaks.
This idea came to paleontologists who studied the teeth of the maniraptors, a vast treasure of dinosaurs that includes the ancestors of modern birds. Most of the group, including the toothy birds, became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous.
Scientists have suggested that the reason for the birds' survival is their diet. They reconstructed the appearance of these creatures - they turned out to be feathered with a short and strong beak, suitable for gnawing and splitting seeds. Some of the birds that specialized in insects probably survived as well.
In 2014, scientists suggested that the birds survived the global catastrophe that killed their relatives thanks to the shape of their eggs. Bird eggs of the Mesozoic era are elongated in shape, and have much more symmetry than modern ones. In addition, their shells are highly porous.
In the same year, paleontologists explained the evolutionary success of birds by the fact that their dinosaur ancestors are the only branch of dinosaurs whose representatives have been continuously decreasing in size over 50 million years. Having become dwarfs in the land of giants, the ancestors of birds occupied new ecological niches and learned to climb trees, plan and fly. As a result, these evolutionary innovations helped the birds survive the cataclysm, which is fatal for large lizards.