“I like to apply the term ‘bird’ to what I think of as the ‘modern bird group’, that is, the most recent common ancestor of all living birds and all its descendants. To me that’s an unambiguous ...

After birds began to evolve separately from dinosaurs at the end of the Jurassic period (around 150 million years ago), two groups of species developed. The Enantiorinthes, which had teeth and clawed ...

But a logical question has bedeviled ornithologists for years: If these birds can't fly, how did they spread across the globe? The standard explanation is that their common ancestor, also ...

For example, modern birds are grouped into the Neornithes clade, because they all emerged from a common Neornithine ancestor ...