Birds currently living on Earth do not have teeth. Let’s find out the cause and discover this interesting fact.

Birds’ beaks are a very fascinating thing for scientists to study. It can be sharp or blunt, bright or dark, small or large, but it all serves the owner’s specific purpose. The beak can be a tool for birds to tear meat, break hard seeds, delicately sip nectar… In general, with their beak, birds can do many things, except chewing. food. The reason is simple and because the beaks of all modern birds have no teeth.

First, let’s go back to 65 million years ago. At that time, a giant meteorite collided with Earth and caused a mass extinction. Because, after this event, about 17% of families, 50% of genera and 75% of species have completely disappeared on the blue planet.

In addition, this event also ended the dominance of large dinosaurs such as: Tyrannosaurus (tyrant dinosaur) or Triceratops (3-horned dinosaur)… Even at that time, The extinction disaster has made the Earth extremely scary with acid rain and the atmosphere polluted by volcanic smoke and dust.

However, this opened the way for the development of mammals, toothed birds and the ancestors of today’s birds (Maniraptoran subgroup – the dinosaur family that includes birds) to become rulers on earth at that time.

The last ancestors of today’s birds escaped extinction thanks to a diet of seeds, while their toothed and carnivorous counterparts became extinct due to scarcity of food sources.

However, during the transition period from the Cretaceous period to the Paleogene period, all toothed birds suddenly died out. According to research by a group of scientists led by master Derek Larson of the University of Toronto (Canada), the reason for this is due to scarce food resources, causing toothed, carnivorous species to perish. , only beaked, toothless, seed-eating species like the ancestors of today’s birds will survive.

To demonstrate this, the above scientific team conducted research on 3,104 tooth samples from 4 Maniraptoran groups excavated throughout western North America. After research, scientists have concluded that the diet of toothed birds is meat , so in conditions of food scarcity due to Earth pollution , these species certainly do not have a chance. to survive.

Meanwhile, birds have no teeth, have beaks, and they can eat nuts. That helps them escape destruction. “Maniraptoran dinosaurs lived very well for 18 million years until the end of the Cretaceous period. Here, toothed birds suddenly died out due to lack of food sources” – Master Derek Larson said.

Thus, today’s birds are toothless because their ancestors survived the mass extinction thanks to a diet of seeds. If they had small teeth and were carnivorous, they would have gone extinct like the maniraptoran toothed species and there would be no birds today.

The research was published in the journal Current Biology over the weekend.