“With this study, we learned two major things,” said Sushma Reddy, lead author and a fellow at The Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois. “First, appearances can be deceiving. Birds that look or act similar are not necessarily related. Second, much of bird classification and conventional wisdom on the evolutionary relationships of birds is wrong” [AFP]. Scientists believe birds, which first appeared roughly 150 million years ago, evolved from small feathered carnivorous dinosaurs. “Modern birds as we know them evolved really rapidly, probably within a few million years, into all of the forms we see. That happened 65 to 100 million years ago,” Reddy said in a telephone interview. Reddy said these quick changes have made bird evolution hard to pin down [Reuters].
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