Toe in the Water

Birdies

Birdies

The prompt for Lilli voted early.🧿 ☕ ’s Promptly Poetry Challenge this week is the word “Birds.” It got me thinking and, eventually, I came up with a particular bird I could write about. On the way, however, I came across a thought that might stand considerable pondering for all of us.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the generally-accepted theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs and that they are, therefore, the survivors of that supposedly extinct line. The idea gives me no problems but I do wonder exactly when this happened.

This is a fairly important question because of the Cretacious-tertiary mass extinction event of 65 million years ago. The currently popular theory is that a large meteor struck the Earth in the vicinity of Mexico, causing severe worldwide climate disruption and the demise of the dinosaurs. So any evolution from dinos to birdies must have taken place before the meteor arrived. There were no dinosaurs left after the event to evolve into anything after that, presumably.

The problem then becomes the dearth of bird fossils found dating from before the meteor. To have given rise to the huge population of birds now evident on our planet, there must have been a few birds at least that witnessed the extinction of the dinosaurs. It seems strange, then, that, so far, we have found no fossils of such early birds.

We do have good old archaeopteryx, of course, and a few other dinosaurs that seem on their way to becoming birds, but nothing that has made the giant step from dinosaur to tweety-bird. It strikes me that this is a bit of a problem when we consider the evolution of birds. Either not all the dinosaurs died in the mass extinction, or we just haven’t found the proto-bird fossils that the theory so desperately needs. There may be good reasons for this absence of fossils but I haven’t thought of them yet.

As an example, it might be that the delicacy of bones needed to ensure lightness and therefore flight has mitigated against their preservation. But we have fossils of things as fragile and ephemeral as ferns and flowers. Can’t think why bird bones should be even more prone to decay before fossilisation.

Understand, I’m not arguing against the theory. I’m as keen on the idea of little flying dinosaurs as anyone else. But I do wonder about how it worked.

Such are the devious ways my brain employs to avoid serious writing work.


Word count: 413