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Modern birds

Birds
Temporal range:
Late Cretaceous - Present,85–0 Ma
Red-crested turaco Steller's sea eagle Rock dove Southern cassowary Gentoo penguin Bar-throated minla Shoebill Grey crowned crane Anna's hummingbird Rainbow lorikeet Grey heron Eurasian eagle-owl White-tailed tropicbird Indian peafowl Atlantic puffin American flamingo Blue-footed booby Keel-billed toucanBird Diversity 2013.png
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Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Clade: Ornithurae
Class: Aves
Linnaeus, 1758
Extant Orders
Synonyms
  • Neornithes Gadow, 1883

Birds (Aves), also known as avian dinosaurs, are a group of endothermic vertebrates, characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a lightweight but strong skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the 5 cm (2 in) bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) ostrich. They rank as the class of tetrapods with the most living species, at approximately ten thousand, with more than half of these being passerines, sometimes known as perching birds.

The fossil record indicates that birds are the last surviving group of dinosaurs, having evolved from feathered ancestors within the theropod group of saurischian dinosaurs. True birds first appeared during the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago. DNA-based evidence finds that birds diversified dramatically around the time of the Cretaceous–Palaeogene extinction event that killed off all other dinosaurs. Birds, especially those in the southern continents, survived this event and then migrated to other parts of the world while diversifying during periods of global cooling. Primitive bird-like dinosaurs that lie outside class Aves proper, in the broader group Avialae, have been found dating back to the mid-Jurassic period. Many of these early "stem-birds", such as Archaeopteryx, were not yet capable of fully powered flight, and many retained primitive characteristics like toothy jaws in place of beaks, and long bony tails.


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Wikipedia

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