Thread 5013254

Why did birds never reach the sizes and diversity of mammals after the eocene? What went wrong?

>>5013254 (OP)
Read the nth word where n is the integer needed to reach ‘mammals’

birds are more diverse than mammals though

>>5013274
10k species of sparrows are all roughly the same. why there's no bird whales or bird moles or bird monkeys or bird wildebees?

>What went wrong?
>fuckhuge asteroid hits into earth wiping out almost all life
>survive and become more prosperous and diverse than mammals
>mog so hard and be so diverse you have no real need to change too much
>humans literally feed you in tribute
>a flightless form of you beat literal humans with guns and WON
>sparrows WON against China/Mao
>be part of the reptilian clade and have warm blood anyway
>literally a dinosaur
Like it or not this is peak performance.

>>5013290
>no bird whales
Penguins are on their way to that
As for the rest? The ones that went the way of the reptile are doing it

>>5013358
>beat literal humans
I wouldn't go that far.

>>5013374
You were saying?

>>5013290
>bird whales
penguin
>bird moles
burrowing owl
>bird monkeys
hoatzin
>bird wildebeest
rhea

>>5013617
>all 3 birds looking kinda hard
>penguin looks like someone glued googly eyes to the side of his head
Kek. Couldn't get a more flattering picture for this dude? They did him dirty.

>>5013290
A third of all mammal species are bats we're in the same boat most mobile form gets all speciation

>>5013617
theyre not nearly as specialized as the mammals theyre being compared to
these are all normal birds with some gimmick

OP here, let me rephrase the topic. back in the late paleocene/early eocene, birds were rapidly diversifying and reached considerable size, while mammals stayed relatively small. whales were three meter long and tall as a dog, horses were big as a pincher, and everything else looked like an overgrown shrew. then suddenly, for no apparent reason, birds began to shrink and decline, they never reached truly massive size like the mammals, which caught up in an astoundingly short amount of time (basilosaurus came out not even 10 million years later). they lost competition with mammals on most fronts, as apex predators, as grazers, as megafauna, and were relegated to be either quick scavengers or small fauna predators. by the end of the pliocene, the only really big birds left were freaks of nature living in isolated environments. i wonder exactly what made mammals more successful than birds and what exactly happened to make them suddenly better.

>>5013618
>SHUT UP N*****!!!

>>5013671
seems like birds for whatever reason don't deviate too much from the basic body structure, while mammals go way more crazy in every direction

Isn't it because oxygen levels lowered?

>>5013947
only arthropods care about oxygen levels when it comes to size

>>5013671
Live birth vs eggs
Temperature changes
Flight is just too advantageous to evolve out of except in extreme cases and that limits size

>>5013785
>censoring "ningen"
You're on 4chan, you /an/imal!

>>5014233
>birds are suffering from success

>>5013274
Birds occupy a much more uniform niche than mammals do, taking the definition literally we are inarguably more diverse. Very few birds are as hyperspecialized for their environments as dolphins, monkeys or elephants are, there's just too many limiting factors on their anatomy as a result of a flight-based evolutionary path. I would even go so far as to say modern mammals eclipse all of dinosauria in actual anatomic diversity

>>5013671
You can only do so much with two legs that four can't do better, teeth also mog beaks in terms of resource extraction for larger scale animals. Also birds lack the counterweight of a tail which is what allowed dinosaur heads to become so big, and usually bigger head (or necks in the case of sauropods) = able to gather large amounts of food more readily = able to become bigger

>>5013671
Divine intervention. It's that simple.

There was a sapient race of dinosaurs. The flood is a remnant of the asteroid story from a tribe of sapient theropods that lived on a coast and experience a tsunami. Their civilization persisted underground until the late stone age.

>>5014148
no not really. mesoamericans were considerably shorter in stature due to the lower levels of oxygen at high altitudes