How the bird got its beak!

Just a pointer to my latest post on 10,000 Birds exploring recent research in which scientists created a GMO chicken with the normal bird beak replaced with the terrible face of the ancient thunder lizards! Well, not exactly, but sort of. Click here to read all about it!

More like this

From the linked article:
“So how did beaks evolve? … we are nearly clueless.”

By See Noevo (not verified) on 19 May 2015 #permalink

Apparently, Greg doesn't allow me to post on his articles.

By See Noevo (not verified) on 19 May 2015 #permalink

"So how did beaks evolve? Recent research provides some important information necessary to begin to address this question, but this and other parallel research, on the other end of birds (the tail) also serve to tell us something very important: when it comes to understanding how evolution actually happened (of birds or anything else) we are standing at the very start of a long and uncertain journey. In other words, we are nearly clueless."

Get used to things like are posted at #1 greg - sn is one of the more prolific liars and anti-science young-earth creationists haunting a couple other blogs here.
Question about beaks and this comment

All birds have them, no other species do.

from the article. I've read articles about squids with "beak" used as

The mouth is equipped with a sharp, horny beak ...

Is "beak" used purely as a descriptor here or does it have some other meaning?

They are called beaks but they are not bird beaks. Only birds have bird beaks! (Turtles have beaks too, but not bird beaks).

That sounds like a tautology and it is the way I stated it, but it is true that the particular morphology and ontogeny of the bird beak is found in birds only. This would be trivial were it not for the fact that many other adaptions also key for birds are found in related non-bird dinosaurs.

Ok - makes sense. But this is the first time I've heard "beak" used for turtles.

A educative and interesting post,which make us understand about the origin of birds beak or how they got it.
Thanks for sharing extremely useful information here.

By anti-bird (not verified) on 21 Dec 2015 #permalink