Are birds the longest surviving creatures on the earth?

If only it were that simple. Some animals, and especially plants and fungi survive through mere persistence and hard-hardheadedness even when they have no heads. There are lobster and sea urchins that from our human standpoint, do not seem to age at all. There are colonies of aspen trees and subterranean mushrooms that are just cloning and rebudding themselves into eternity and it will take the super-novaing sun swallowing up the Earth to stop them. Then there is Man. So clever he may yet escape his native sun's extinction and colonize planets far away, and survive as long as this or whatever other universe's there are do, but who can say if he won't kill his own kind off himself first. Avians are just a bird-brained coward by comparison to any of these, but they are pretty!
 
Birds are the evolution of dinosaurs.

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Birds have several disadvantages due to modifications in their anatomy to make flight possible.
  • Their bones are hollow to reduce weight. These bones are rather fragile, and it is very difficult for a broken bone to heal properly. This lightness makes them very poor fighters, easily killed by predatory mammals such as cats and dogs.
  • They have very primitive immune systems, again to reduce weight by having rather small organs. When a bird gets sick it will probably die.
  • Their eyes are composed almost entirely of cones for color vision, with few rods for night vision, if any. This makes them virtually helpless in the dark, easy prey for nocturnal predators that can climb trees. In the modern era of electric lights, this is a tremendous problem for them. They see the lighted windows in office buildings at night, and assume that they're seeing dawn over the horizon. So they fly directly into the glass and either die from the impact, or are stunned and fall to the ground. This kills about half a billion birds every year in the USA alone.
But in response to the O.P., birds are newcomers in the earth's biosphere. Fish are much more ancient. But the more primitive animals are even older--for example the arthropods (insects, spiders, crustaceans, etc.).
 
Saint said:
Because they can fly to escape danger and natural disaster.
True?
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Every organism is interconnected in biology -- based on the Darwinian model of natural selection, we all share a common ancestor somewhere down the line. You'll have to be more specific about what you mean when you say "Longest living".
 
Saint said:
some people say cockroach survives longest
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That's because they have developed a symbiotic relationship with humans--cleaning up our enormous quantity of garbage. If our species is wiped out by a natural disaster or our own foolishness, the cockroaches will have to learn to survive in a natural setting.
 
Fraggle Rocker said:
That's because they have developed a symbiotic relationship with humans--cleaning up our enormous quantity of garbage. If our species is wiped out by a natural disaster or our own foolishness, the cockroaches will have to learn to survive in a natural setting.
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Cockroach.jpg
Cockroaches and roachids have been around in excess of 300,000,000 years. How can you say they need man? 'Symbiotic suggests that the species need each other. Man don't need cockroaches, and cockroaches don't need man.
 
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