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Featured articleBird is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
Main Page trophyThis article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page as Today's featured article on May 4, 2010.
Article milestones
DateProcessResult
November 4, 2005Good article nomineeListed
June 21, 2007Peer reviewReviewed
December 20, 2007Featured article candidatePromoted
Current status: Featured article


Temporal range

According to a recently published analysis, crown birds originated in the Upper Cretaceous, 94 million years ago [1]. Probably we should add this information to the article and correct the temporal range. HFoxii (talk) 04:52, 22 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

@HFoxii: I would not trust molecular clocks when it comes to massive adaptive radiations, as is clearly the case for birds. Molecular clocks for flowering plants project the radiation as beginning at the Triassic-Jurassic boundary, some 65 million years before it actually began happening. Hemiauchenia (talk) 09:42, 29 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Good example of false precision. "94" implies "from 93.5 to 94.5", but actually molecular clock does not give such precision at all, and in this particular case scatter of published data reaches ~30 Ma: paleognaths and neognaths diverged about 100 Ma ago in Jarvis et al., 2014; about 73±6 in Prum et al., 2015; about 87 in Kimball et al., 2019; 94 in Kuhl et al., 2021. Sneeuwschaap (talk) 10:35, 10 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Could use some expertise

A need for a reference has come up at Talk:Dinosaur#Birds at 10.000 species​. Are there 10,000 species of birds? Thanks. And if not, is there an accurate count? Please reply there if possible, an ongoing discussion. Randy Kryn (talk) 17:46, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

There are four main bird checklists and I think all are over 10,000. The IOC has 10,806 species and Clements/BOW have 10,721 species. I can dig up the numbers for H&M and IUCN/Birdlife tomorrow if it helps. —  Jts1882 | talk  20:29, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Seems the edits have been solved at the dinosaur page but if you have additional cites that would just add to the data. Another question that discussion has opened up is at the big year page, where the world record is given as two different numbers (one in the lead, on in the text) and have also addressed this question at its talk page although this may be a better place to mention it. Randy Kryn (talk) 20:34, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]
You might also want to check Reptile Database who have extant "reptiles" at 11,440 species. —  Jts1882 | talk  20:40, 25 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Suggestions for improvement

Heart type and features & Organisation: I suggest spending less time on the technical details and more time on the actual point, which would likely be a comparison to other animals, because much of what is said (heart, arteries, arterioles, veins...) doesn't look to be very specific to birds, and overall seems to be out of place.

The "greater surface area to gas exchange" and "more blood in their capillaries per unit of volume of lung" are weirdly connected with "As a result", even though the former doesn't imply the latter (it seems it's actually a greater surface area per unit of volume). Also, birds' lungs were already mentioned earlier (at the beginning of "Respiratory and circulatory systems"), so any other lungs point should probably go there too.

Lungs are a really exiting point about birds, one that deserve a better treatment. The point is that our lungs suck while birds' don't. I know that some birds can fly at high altitude because they can make use of oxygen at low pressure thanks to a reverse flow exchange system (like fish do: the blood's O2 and CO2 pressure ends up close to the external fluid's, instead of settling for an intermediate value inside a bag of mixed fresh and stale air) but the reader of the current article has no chance to get the point. I didn't know that all birds had some kind of "always fresh air" lungs, and I still don't know if they all have the whole reverse flow exchange package or not. Does this imply respiration consumes less energy? Does that make e.g. ostriches better for long distance running? Did we just fail at lungs' evolution, or do the birds' lungs have some king of drawback? That's the kind of things I would have liked to read about, in this article or in some linked article.

Nervous system: Another interesting point: some birds with high vision requirement have correctly wired eyes, with the wiring behind the retina, rather than getting in the way like ours. But the most striking thing about birds is that some of them have a better brain than we do! We went all brains in our evolution till we spent 40% of our energy feeding it, yet the mysteriously high intelligence of crows and parrots was finally explained with an evolutionary innovation that we don't have: smaller better-packed brain cells. Unfortunately even the wikipedia "Bird_intelligence" article seems to have missed the relevant publication, so here it is:

PNAS "Birds have primate-like numbers of neurons in the forebrain" https://www.pnas.org/content/113/26/7255

"the nuclear architecture of the avian brain appears to exhibit more efficient packing of neurons and their interconnections than the layered architecture of the mammalian neocortex."

In other words, dinosaurs almost got to rule the planet again...

Thank you all for writing wikipedia, best wishes — Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.250.143.165 (talk) 18:36, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

It would be very interesting to see a source for "some birds with high vision requirement have correctly wired eyes, with the wiring behind the retina". Birds do have some improvements of vision (absence of retinal vessels, partial absence of axon myelinization), but not so great as absence of retinal inversion. Sneeuwschaap (talk) 14:27, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

WP:URFA/2020

I'm reviewing this article against the FA criteria as part of the effort to check all old featured articles (WP:URFA/2020). The core of the article is solid, but I am worried by large body of old research cited and the level of difficulty. Specifically

  1. The first two paragraphs of the article don't comply with WP:MTAU: it's too difficult considering the fact that the audience for this article includes teenagers and other people who have not been to university.
    • Can the first long sentence be split into two, to avoid the structure the laying of hard shelled eggs.
    • I don't quite understand what a perching bird is.
    • Ratites is jargon, the other examples suffice.
    • Endemic is jargon
    • in the second paragraph, ptetosaurs should either be glossed, or replaced with a lay description.
    • mya should be written out in full.
  2. Gauthier and de Queiroz[8] identified four different definitions for the same biological name "Aves", which is a problem. Editorializing?
  3. Despite being currently one of the most widely used, the crown-group definition of Aves has been criticised by some researchers. Lee and Spencer (1997) ... Cannot use a 1997 source for the word current.
  4. Some basal members -> gloss basal?
  5. though it is possibly closely related to the true ancestor. -> 2007 study, do we know more?
  6. The integument evolved -> no idea what integument is
    Wikilinked; is that sufficient, or do you want more here?
  7. co-ossification -> Can guess what this means from latin classes only
  8. These two subdivisions are often given the rank of superorder,[40] although Livezey and Zusi assigned them "cohort" rank.[5] -> what is common now? Cohort still due?
  9. Depending on the taxonomic viewpoint, the number of known living bird species varies anywhere from 9,800[41] to 10,758.[42] Talk page discussion seemed to indicate all estimates are now above 10,000? 2007 study too old here, and FN42 doesn't include year.
  10. however recent studies found higher speciation rates in the high latitudes that were offset by greater extinction rates than in the tropics. Study from 2007, still up to date? Definitely not recent.
  11. The orbits are large and separated by a bony septum. -> Don't understand even the topic of this sentence
  12. However, one recent study claimed to demonstrate temperature-dependent sex determination among the Australian brushturkey, for which higher temperatures during incubation resulted in a higher female-to-male sex ratio.[86] This, however, was later proven to not be the case. These birds do not exhibit temperature-dependent sex determination, but temperature-dependent sex mortality.[87] Is a disproven older study due?
  13. myogenic -> gloss?
  14. Oxygenated blood then flows from the lungs through the left atrium to the left ventricle where it is pumped out to the body. citation needed.
  15. A lack of field observations limit our knowledge, but intraspecific conflicts are known to sometimes result in injury or death.[110] -> More field observations 10 years later?
  16. Geese and dabbling ducks are primarily grazers. citation needed
  17. Feather care is now described in two different section, with overlapping information.

I've come as far as communication, and will review further if there is interest making this article shiny again. If the article cannot be improved via talk, it may be taken to WP:featured article review. We're never in a hurry at FAR, and willing to help :). FemkeMilene (talk) 11:05, 21 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Femkemilene; we at WP:BIRD will take a look and work to make the improvements you've asked for. However, we've just been hit with a few of these and our numbers are limited, so it may take a week or so! MeegsC (talk) 14:58, 21 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
A week would be very fast :). We've got a lot of patience as we're trying to save as many stars as possible. FemkeMilene (talk) 19:42, 21 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Great! We're certainly willing to do what is necessary. MeegsC (talk) 22:05, 21 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I - and I'm sure others in WP:PALEO - would be happy to help with the paleontological aspects of the article too. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 22:52, 21 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Femkemilene are you satisfied here or is there work remaining? I will review once you are satisfied, SandyGeorgia (Talk) 16:17, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi SandyGeorgia. We haven't gotten very far here; I'm still working on elfin woods warbler, Sabine's Sunbird is busy updating seabird and we're currently shepherding various articles through the FA/FL/GA process. Given the project's very small member numbers, we're kinda drowning at the moment! But it's definitely on our radar screen. MeegsC (talk) 16:55, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Understood (and sympathize :) SandyGeorgia (Talk) 17:22, 19 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

birds and not dinosaurs

These are English words, which have meanings government by common usage, not claudistic analysis. In common English usage dinosaur refers to a class of animals that all went extint millions of years before the first humans came to be. THis is how my Physical anthopology professor used the term in arguing that dionsaurs and humans never coexisted. Here [2] states dinosaurs died out 65 million years before the first humans existed. Here [3] is another firm no to dinosaurs and humans ever coexisting. I could cite lots and lots and lots and lots more sources.John Pack Lambert (talk) 17:56, 22 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I'm sorry, this is not an English article. This is a science article.
The sources you cite are not scientific literature. They are popular sources and therefore irrelevant to the stance taken by this article. For every source you cite there is another source from the literature which refers to birds as dinosaurs.
There is no point contending with this topic, which is the subject of consensus established over many discussions. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 18:19, 22 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That's not entirely true. This is an encyclopaedia article and has to cover both common English language usage and scientific usage. The fact we use the common name for the article title (by Wikipedia naming convention) makes it difficult and the reason we have so many of these discussions. If the article was Aves it would be easy. I take the view that bird and reptile (or dinosaur) are exclusive (English usage) but that Aves is a subset of Dinosauria and Reptilia. As the article naming convention requires us to synonymise Aves and bird we are led to a problem that is hard to resolve. —  Jts1882 | talk  20:44, 22 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I don't disagree there. I think relegating discussion of birds as dinosaurs to the second paragraph of the lede - as we settled on - is a good compromise. Whether or not this discussion is sufficiently qualified in terms of the different usages of the word is also a valid subject of debate. John seems to be advocating for complete removal, which would certainly be lying by omission. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 00:00, 23 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Split avian dinosaurs into separate article

This article should be about current birds, not reptiles. All reptilian content should be split into a separate article, proposed as Avian dinosaurs (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views). It might also be split into Origin of birds (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views).
William Allen Simpson (talk) 04:40, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

See also: Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2021 February 22#Birds. There have been many reverts by multiple editors parenting Bird categories under Dinosaurs and Reptiles.
William Allen Simpson (talk) 04:49, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

William Allen Simpson, why—other than to placate the "I don't believe in science or evolution" brigade—would we want to do so? MeegsC (talk) 09:32, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Your ideas expressed at the category discussion are incorrect and completely contrary to scientific thinking and practice. I see no reason to split. What, exactly, are these "avian dinosaurs" you speak of? Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 13:29, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This subject has already been discussed a ton of times on different page and project discussions, the scientific info in Wikipedia is, and should be, based on scientific research, not the opinion of the general public. So yeah, I don't see any reason to split. JurassicClassic767 (talk | contribs) 14:47, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly how different pages on Wikipedia should use the term "dinosaur" is a reasonable question (as in your second link above). Whether the page about birds should discuss the evolutionary history of birds is not a reasonable question, similar to a suggestion that the page India should not include any content prior to 1950. Somatochlora (talk) 15:47, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Don't see why. Taxonomically there's no argument to be had; from a housekeeping/article organization perspective, that material makes up just a small portion of the page and mostly consists of summaries for other (main) articles anyway. No change needed here. --Elmidae (talk · contribs) 17:57, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Split makes no sense. Oppose unless some convincing rationale proposed Cas Liber (talk · contribs) 19:32, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, per above. LittleJerry (talk) 17:13, 4 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I'm against. Avian dinosaurs and birds are one and the same. HFoxii (talk) 08:57, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose, per all above. Birds are part of Dinosauria and avian and non-avian dinosaurs are terms introduced to distinguish birds from other traditional dinosaurs that aren't birds. By definition birds and avian dinosaurs are the same thing, so splitting the article makes no sense. People have to accept that words can get used in different senses that depend on context. Terms like dinosaurs and reptiles usually exclude birds in general discussion, but when discussing evolution they have to be included as that's what the scientific evidence tells us. The idea that we should avoid mentioning this so as not to confuse the general reader also makes no sense. This is an encyclopaedia and the aim is to educate and inform. Most people find it interesting that birds evolved within dinosaurs so hiding this information doesn't serve the reader well. I'll add that I suspect most people coming to this article already know what a bird is and that they come here to learn more about them. —  Jts1882 | talk  09:25, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
This article should be about current birds, not reptiles - that usage of "reptiles" rather confirms the need to put birds in evolutionary context in a single article even if it is slightly large. Strongly oppose splitting. Shyamal (talk) 10:07, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. The only reasoning of the splitting is a disbelief in the validity of science. Dimadick (talk) 12:02, 6 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose per above. Dan the Animator 22:25, 7 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose per everyone else. I am also not sure what you mean by "all reptilian content should be split" considering that birds are reptiles per current biological knowledge. Current textbooks (including that used at the community college where I work) often include birds in the reptile chapter. --Khajidha (talk) 21:05, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Bird&oldid=1013033411

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