
Birds had to relearn flight after meteor wiped out dinosaurs - a_w
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/24/birds-had-to-relearn-flight-after-meteor-that-wiped-out-dinosaurs
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cwmma
This seems to say that forests were gone, so all tree dwelling birds died out
and thus all modern birds are descended from ground dwelling birds. Looking at
the paper [1] it seems to only say 'reduced flight capacity' which makes more
sense, considering we only know of 4 times flight has only evolved so this
would be a big deal if birds had evolved it twice.

1\. [https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(18)...](https://www.cell.com/current-
biology/fulltext/S0960-9822\(18\)30534-7)

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dekhn
Basically, you can't take any science reporting major media at face value. The
headlines are written as click-bait, and typically in a non-scientific
fashion. Some scientists are also prone to releasing catchy PR that
misinterprets their results.

~~~
ISL
Most of us natively write anti-clickbait titles.

Though it is rarely cited, my favorite paper that I've co-authored is:

Indirect Evidence for Lévy Walks in Squeeze Film Damping:
[https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4926](https://arxiv.org/abs/1005.4926)

It could have alternatively been titled: "Holy crap! Did you know that high-
vacuum gas particles trapped between two walls follow fractal paths?!"

~~~
ChuckMcM
"You won't believe where these high vacuum particles go when they move, or how
they get there!"

~~~
kevin_thibedeau
Bait me with how this affects my car insurance and you've got a click.

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jonbarker
These four tech giants are upending this centuries old industry... with
quantum entanglement.

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Isamu
I never understood the evolutionary push to develop flight, because I thought
of it as an expensive form of transport.

Until this graph, which shows the cost of transport to actually favor flight
over terrestrial locomotion.

[http://www.wprize.org/images/TuckerCostGraph.gif](http://www.wprize.org/images/TuckerCostGraph.gif)

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soared
Any other info or a higher res for that graph? That totally goes against what
I would've assumed! (Trains are wildly inefficient?! Swimming is more
efficient than flying or running?)

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mjmahone17
I think you’re reading that wrong. Trains are nearly the lowest energy/kg per
unit distance travelled, as they’re in the bottom of the graph. Though it’s a
bit weird for the x axis to be mass, too.

Basically the y axis is a measure of efficiency. The x axis just spreads out
the points so you can compare things of similar mass.

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soared
Oh I was reading it wrong, thank you. Its hard to see on mobile. Glad to hear
trains are efficient again though.

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deepsun
What about tons of regular birds that don't need trees? Eagles, condors,
gulls, albatrosses, etc.

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vvanders
Where do you think eagles nest and raise their young before they can learn to
fly?

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seszett
Many species of birds nest on the ground or below ground in treeless places
though.

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skybrian
Note that ground-dwelling doesn't necessarily mean flightless. The article in
Cell only says they were "non-arboreal" and hardly mentions flight.

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artur_makly
i must have missed that day in Science class..but when did they prove a
massive meteor hit and killed Dino?

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ghaff
There have been a number of discoveries but the most central one is probably
of an Iridium layer by Alvarez in 1980. AFAIK there’s still debate around
whether the meteorite that landed in the Gulf of Mexico was truly the Dino
killer or if it just hastened a process that was well on its way in any case.

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pfdietz
There's really no serious debate about that anymore. The temporal
juxtaposition of this extremely violent event with the extinctions means it
would be an incredible coincidence if there weren't a causal connection, and
there is little to no evidence anything else was contributing. In particular,
there is no good evidence ecosystems were in decline before the impact
(previous claims to that effect were just due to sampling problems and logical
errors.)

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pfdietz
BTW, it is now thought that all existing species of placental mammals are
descended from a SINGLE species that survived the K-Pg boundary extinction.

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Tloewald
Given the incompleteness of our fossil records, this makes the old joke about
the astrophysicist and the black sheep seem apropos.

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riazrizvi
Nature 0. Nurture +1.

