Okay, so we were just talking about a Big Bang of birds.
Some speak of a Big Bang of mammals (“These new findings call for a re-evaluation of the evolutionary story of placental mammals,” says Anne Yoder, an evolutionary biologist at Duke University, who wasn’t involved in the work.”) and flowers (“Turns out, these bloomers went through an evolutionary “Big Bang” of sorts some 130 million years ago, a brief era of explosive floral diversification at a time when dinosaurs walked the Earth.”)
So, we looked for a Big Bang of turtles, but … naw, not turtles.
But wait! Someone suggested, no one would believe that about turtles, so they wouldn’t have used the phrase. Just for luck, try “rapid evolution” instead.
And guess what? From Sea Turtle World:
It is believed that the evolution process for sea turtles took place very rapidly instead of slowly over a long period of time. This suggests to researchers that there were some significant changes that took place on Earth. Perhaps the same one that caused so many other animals in the world to either evolve or to become extinct.
See also, on the same find: Modern birds radiated before dinosaur extinction? (Researchers: Contrary to assumptions, our new work suggests that birds began to radiate before this massive extinction.)
The Founding Feathers? Researchers: The common ancestor of today’s birds probably lived much later than formerly thought.
and
Talk to the fossils: Let’s see what they say back
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