Big Brains May Have Helped Birds Survive Dinosaur-Killing Asteroid

[muriel_volestrangler]

Just a few million years before an asteroid killed nearly all dinosaurs on Earth, a creature resembling a small albatross with teeth flew through the Cretaceous skies. The creature, known as Ichthyornis, is considered an early bird -- but not part of the lucky lineage that survived the mass extinction and gave rise to modern birds.
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The earliest known bird is Archaeopteryx, which lived about 84 million years before the K-Pg extinction. Archaeopteryx shared a similar brain shape with nonbird dinosaurs and reptiles, with the cerebellum and optic lobes arranged in a straight line behind a modest-sized forebrain. In contrast, the forebrains of all modern birds are hugely enlarged, spreading above the optic lobes and pushing the whole brain into a new arrangement.
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"Usually one of the first things that happens is the skull gets crushed," said Christopher Torres, a paleo-ornithologist at Ohio University in Athens. "What makes our new specimen of Ichthyornis so special is that it preserves a nearly complete skull."
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There were probably multiple factors that helped the ancestors of modern birds survive, noted Torres. Still, the new findings suggest an enlarged forebrain could be part of what gave them their edge. The forebrain orchestrates many high-level cognitive tasks, and it tends to be enlarged in highly intelligent animals. Torres suspects that early birds with big forebrains were better able to change their behavior in response to the chaotic climate conditions following the asteroid impact.

https://insidescience.org/news/big-brains-may-have-helped-birds-survive-dinosaur-killing-asteroid

The paper:

Bird neurocranial and body mass evolution across the end-Cretaceous mass extinction: The avian brain shape left other dinosaurs behind

Abstract
Birds today are the most diverse clade of terrestrial vertebrates, and understanding why extant birds (Aves) alone among dinosaurs survived the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction is crucial to reconstructing the history of life. Hypotheses proposed to explain this pattern demand identification of traits unique to Aves. However, this identification is complicated by a lack of data from non-avian birds. Here, we interrogate survivorship hypotheses using data from a new, nearly complete skull of Late Cretaceous (~70 million years) bird Ichthyornis and reassess shifts in bird body size across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary. Ichthyornis exhibited a wulst and segmented palate, previously proposed to have arisen within extant birds. The origin of Aves is marked by larger, reshaped brains indicating selection for relatively large telencephala and eyes but not by uniquely small body size. Sensory system differences, potentially linked to these shifts, may help explain avian survivorship relative to other dinosaurs.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/7/31/eabg7099

[niyad]

1. Sooo, "birdbrain" is actually a compliment.

[Goonch]

2. newly discovered Ichthyornis specimen has a mostly intact skull that preserves details of the brain

Fossils of early birds almost always have crushed skulls, but this newly discovered Ichthyornis specimen has a mostly intact skull that preserves details of the brain.

[NNadir]

3. That's amusing. Big brains have turned a particular species into something worse than...

...an asteroid in extinction capability.

[Sneederbunk]

4. So there is hope for bird brains?