Question: Why did dinos evolve into birbs

Zoe Vance answered on 16 Oct 2024:

There probably isn’t one big reason why birds evolved, the individual features that we’d consider to make something a bird like wings, feathers etc. likely existed long before birds did. Also birds had actually evolved from a sub-group of dinosaurs before the big extinction so they existed at the same time as some dinosaurs – it isn’t like a sudden overnight change from dinosaurs to birds.
I’m no dino (or birb) expert, but the answer to why anything evolves in a particular direction is basically always that the new form is in some way better suited to the current environment than the old one, so you need to ask what birds might have that would have given them an advantage. Palaeontologists seem to think that getting smaller was a pretty important step, as was developing beaks, and there are sensible reasons for why these things might have happened. Smaller size might have helped with flight, or more generally it can be a better strategy when times are tough because smaller bodies are more efficient, and beaks are a very useful tool to have when you don’t have hands! It’s possible these features also allowed birds to take up some new diet that other creatures existing at the time couldn’t access; evolving into an unoccupied ‘niche’ is a very common pattern in evolution.