Fifty years ago, it would have seemed strange for a paleontologist to write a book about birds, but today we know why the pairing makes sense. Birds are dinosaurs: it’s as literally true as saying humans are mammals. The brontosaurus and the triceratops might have been wiped off the face of the planet 66 million years ago by an asteroid the size of Mount Everest — just about anything bigger than a dog was — but the dinosaurs never really went away. There are probably a few perched outside your window right now, gathering twigs, hunting insects, and chirping.
Recommended Stories
In the first half of the new book The Story of Birds, paleontologist Steve Brusatte, who teaches at the University of Edinburgh, makes the argument that dinosaurs are much more bird-like than you probably imagine. Many had colorful feathers, yes, but they also shared similar skeletal structures, talons, and even lungs. Unfortunately, this section of the book is a bit slow-going. That may seem like unfair criticism for a popular science primer covering hundreds of millions of years, but I found myself zoning out as the Latin name of one extinct species bled into the Latin name of another extinct species. Please don’t quiz me on the difference between coelurosaurs and dromaeosaurids. I’m sure their skeletal structures differ in subtle but important ways: I just can’t remember how. Brusatte includes a wealth of interesting facts, but every time I looked back at a completed chapter, I felt as though I had only picked up a few.
Things really get going when that asteroid crashes to Earth. Here, Brusatte’s skills as a writer are on display. Consider his description of what is undoubtedly the worst day in the history of our planet. After the asteroid hits with the power of a billion nuclear bombs, “Tsunamis ravaged the coasts, earthquakes shattered the ground, fires engulfed the forests, and windstorms howled. Sonic booms echoed for hours on end. Volcanos belched up poison from deep underground, and the rain became acidic. Bullets of molten glass literally poured down from the heavens.” Trillions of living beings died in the ensuing decades as 75% of species — not animals, species — went extinct.
It’s after the great extinction, with so many ecological niches now eerily empty, that birds start to diversify and specialize. Truly, however strange you think birds are, they’re stranger. Did you know the average songbird has a second stomach that it fills with rocks to help grind food? Or that swifts enter the stratosphere to fall asleep while they fly? Or that the South American hoatzin, which looks something like a “punk rock chicken,” constantly belches methane because of its vegetarian diet, earning it the nickname “stinkbird”? Darwin’s finches and their famously varied beaks naturally make an appearance, but they’ve got nothing on the sword-billed hummingbird, whose own “straw-like beak” is longer than its body.
By Steve Brusatte; Mariner; 448 pp.; $35
And the extinct birds are even wilder! Forget dodos: our world used to contain penguins the size of NFL linemen, elephant birds that laid eggs the size of watermelons, and one Dromornis, a ten-foot-tall behemoth whose “super-thickened hind limb bones imply maximum body weights in the range of 1,300–1,600 pounds.” I’m happy to report that this last monstrosity was a vegetarian. And if you’re interested in this stuff but haven’t kept up with the latest research, there are plenty of new discoveries to learn about. Only 12 years ago, scientists published descriptions of a South Carolina fossil named Pelagornis, a “bird so big it defied the laws of animal flight.” Flapping simply doesn’t work with a wingspan so large, a whopping 19-to-24 feet, so these birds “were giant hang gliders [who] spent most of their time soaring on air currents rather than propelling themselves through the airstream with active wingbeats.”
Perhaps the most interesting section is on bird cognition. Most bird brains are small because most birds are small. But they make up for the fact by cramming more neurons into the space they have. Brusatte tells us that a goldcrest, which weighs one-sixth of one ounce, “has 164 million neurons, double that of a two-hundred-pound … Nile crocodile.” On average, a bird has 21 times more neurons than a similarly sized reptile and two times more neurons than a similarly sized mammal. If the next extinction event leads to a master race of 300-pound cockatoos, they’ll probably all be able to solve Fermat’s Last Theorem.
The smartest birds are the corvids, highly social animals who recognize themselves in mirrors, use tools to obtain food (without being shown how), and display the ability to delay gratification for greater future rewards. One of Aesop’s fables tells the story of a crow who dropped stones into a pitcher until the water at the bottom was high enough to drink. 2,600 years later, scientists decided to put that story to the test, and “the corvids quickly figured out they could make the water rise by dropping in stones, but not sawdust.”
The book ends, as all science books about nature seemingly must, with a warning about environmental degradation. Whatever your politics, it’s disheartening to learn that over the last 50 years, North America has lost a full 30% of its birds. Still, their biggest killer might surprise you: it’s not climate change or pollution, but house cats, who are responsible for 2.4 billion avian deaths a year. Probably best to put a bell on Fluffy’s collar if you’re going to let her outside.
I wish this book moved faster in the first half, but Brusatte is a congenial writer whose expertise is matched by his enthusiasm. If you’re interested in dinosaurs, interested in birds, or interested in fully understanding how the two are really one and the same, The Story of Birds is worth your time.
Alexander Kaplan is a writer based in Richmond, Virginia.
