Asteroid impact responsible for creation of birds

[Plazma Inferno!]

A new study suggests that every bird we know today can trace its ancestry to creatures that lived about 95 million years ago on a chunk of land that split off from the supercontinent Gondwana. This lineage underwent a major burst of evolution after an asteroid slammed into Earth about 66 million years ago and killed off the rest of their dinosaurian kin.

Source

 

[C C]

Mammals, of course, also benefited from the reboot of ecological niche competition. One should welcome anything to break the decades-long monotony of that Woodstock-ian "we are stardust" cliché.

Passerby with custom-logo T-shirt: "Spawn of violent asteroid smack".

Another: "Conceived by illicit dark matter / comet affair".

 

[Daecon]

A similar phenomenon to the "Cambrian explosion"?

 

[exchemist]

A similar phenomenon to the "Cambrian explosion"?

As I understand it, no.

The so-called "Cambrian Explosion" is, I gather, more generally described in scientific circles at the "Cambrian Radiation", meaning the radiation outward of increasingly diverse life forms during the Cambrian era. The radiation took place over a period of about 30-40 million years, so was by no means a singular event, in the way that the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous is thought to be. Creationists like the term "explosion" because they think it is evidence that evolution cannot account for the pace of diversification. But 30 million years is half the time between the end of the dinosaurs and ourselves.