The Asteroid That Smote the Dinosaurs Burned the Birds Out of Trees

Around 66 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, an asteroid the size of Mount Everest smote the Earth. It landed in Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula, punching a 20-mile deep crater into the ground. That impact, and the climatic upheaval that happened afterwards, ended the long reign of the dinosaurs. Of this dynasty of ruling reptiles, only the birds—a specialized group of feathered dinosaurs—survived.

But the birds didn’t escape unscathed.

Birds first appeared around 150 million years ago, during the late Jurassic that were similar to . By the end of the Cretaceous, they were flourishing. But the same catastrophe that finished off their dinosaur cousins . Even incredibly diverse and widespread groups, like the enantiornithines (eh-NAN-tee-OR-nih-theens), died out. The surviving birds were forced to re-evolve much of the diversity that once existed, and most groups of modern birds , in the aftermath of the asteroid strike.