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bones in the foot. Ornithuromorpha, being the ancestors of all modern birds had shoulder joints like those of modern birds, a complete carpometacarpus, fused leg bones, and a more familiar number of vertebrae. Ornithuromorpha would look like a modern bird even if you did give it that second glance, once again except for the teeth.

Still before the end of the Cretaceous, Ornithuromorpha gave rise to two families. The first, Hesperornithoforms, had ironically lost their flight ability after all that specialization, and dove to catch fish, using strong legs. They were outlived by their sister group the Ichthyornis, a group of creatures that mostly looked like gulls with teeth, and were the ancestors to all modern birds.

Modern birds have diversified significantly from the late Cretaceous, weighing in at around 10,000 species, split into two groups. The ratite tradition contains many recently extinct flightless birds, from the bizarre wingless moa of New Zealand to Madagascar's elephant bird, lost as late as the 1500s. They are survived by the ostrich, kiwi, and few others. Neognaths make up the vast majority of the worlds' birds splitting into numerous groups for fowl, water birds, penguins, and songbirds. The fossil record is rich in data on the path that has lead birds to be one of the most successful forms of life on present day earth, and the wide variety of highly specialized forms they take, right down to the shape of their beak is what made Darwin first see the finches of the Galapagos Islands and postulate the theory of evolution.

Learn more about this author, Elizabeth Uselton.
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