How many birds are there in the world? The latest study found that their number is 6 times that of humans!

How many birds are there on earth? 1 million? 100 million? Even 1 billion? A surprising number is that, according to research, scientists believe that there are at least 500 billion birds on the earth, and they are from about 10,000 different species. Obviously, this is a very shocking number.

6 times as many as humans!

In life, many friends will think that human beings are the most numerous species on the earth, but the answer is not the case. Many animals that we ignore in our lives, such as insects and so on, are actually big families in nature. , and the numbers are staggering.

Take birds as an example, in terms of the total number, it is about 6 times that of humans. At the same time, sparrows, barn swallows, European starlings and ring-billed gulls are also members of the "1 billion club" among birds. Their population numbers, more than 1 billion.

Some friends may be curious, are there really so many birds on the earth? For people living in cities, it is rare to see flocks of birds, but for people living in the countryside, or when we go to nature, we will find that there are actually a lot of birds.

Especially in many inaccessible places, there are also many birds, and many of them are very rare species. For example, in Antarctica, there are 7 species of penguins living in Antarctica. From the total number of penguins in Antarctica, there are about 100 million penguins. They are also one of the most common residents of Antarctica. However, they are far away from people's lives. The area is often overlooked, and many people do not know that there are so many penguins in Antarctica.

Speaking of which, birds, like mammals, are one of the most successful evolutionary groups on earth after the Cretaceous period. They all appeared at the same time. They all originated in the early Cretaceous period, and then in the fifth mass extinction. Later, as a survivor, he quickly filled his place in nature. So, the ancestors of mammals are reptiles, and who are the ancestors of birds?

How did birds originate?

Speaking of which, birds are not the earliest flying vertebrates on earth, because as early as the Triassic period more than 200 million years ago, there was a land-crawling lizard that broke through the shackles of evolution and evolved into the earth. The largest flying vertebrate - pterosaurs.

However, although pterosaurs can fly, they are not the ancestors of birds. It can even be said that there is no relationship between pterosaurs and birds. Because in the Cretaceous period, when the early birds appeared, the advantage of pterosaurs actually began to gradually disappear, and in the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period, pterosaurs were wiped out, and together with dinosaurs, they became history.

Of course, there is also a view that the dinosaurs did not all go extinct, but some of them successfully evolved and became birds, or it can be said that the current birds are the only dinosaurs that have survived so far. As for why the early birds did not The extinction, the researchers think, may be related to their ability to dive, their small size, and their ease of finding shelter.

So, are dinosaurs really the ancestors of birds? What many people don't know is that as early as the 19th century, the famous British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley once proposed the conjecture that birds may have originated from dinosaurs, but Huxley had no evidence at that time. It's just that when I simply eat turkey, I found that the skeleton structure of turkey is very similar to that of dromaeosaurs.

Then, in 1862, archaeologists discovered the fossils of Archaeopteryx that shocked the world. Through fossil research, the researchers were surprised to find that Archaeopteryx had the dual characteristics of dinosaurs and early birds at the same time. At the same time, it also had feathers and tails. The discovery has made it considered the ancestor of birds for a long time.

However, later, through research, there is a view that Archaeopteryx does not actually fly, because it can be seen from the fossil sternum that it cannot flap its wings and fly like the birds we are familiar with.

After more than 100 years, with the discovery of Microraptor and Sinosauropteryx, the identity of Archaeopteryx was finally denied. At the same time, researchers also believe that there is a high probability that early birds were composed of small theropods. Dinosaurs evolved, but in the beginning, these small dinosaurs had wings, not for flight, but to keep warm.

Subsequently, with changes in the climate environment and the continuous evolution of the species themselves, they can use their wings to gradually glide between the branches, and finally have the ability to fly.

Although it seems incredible, it is not enough. From the point of view that bats and flying squirrels in mammals have the ability to fly through long evolution, everything is possible. After all, ungulates on land can also Evolved into whales in the ocean, and lizards on land, and can also evolve into mosasaurs and pterosaurs, so why can't dinosaurs evolve into birds? What do you think of it?