Birds have no teeth. No shit Sherlock, we hear you say.
But there is a reason. And a new research paper says it has nothing to do with their hunting for worms or their weight.
Actually, birds gave up teeth to speed up egg hatching, a research paper published Wednesday suggests, challenging long-held scientific views on the evolution of the toothless beak.
Compared to an incubation period of several months for dinosaur eggs, modern birds hatch after just a few days or weeks.
The embryos of lizards and birds develop at crucially different speeds because of the need for the embryo to develop teeth – a process which can take up to 60% of incubation time, according to Tzu-Ruei Yang and Dr Martin Sander, as reported on Sky.
And given birds tend to lay eggs and allow them to incubate on surfaces, they literally need to hatch themselves fast.
Faster incubation would have been aided by early birds and some dinos taking to brooding their eggs in open nests rather than burying them as of old, said the research team.
They conceded their hypothesis was not consistent with toothlessness in turtles, which still have a long incubation period.
With information from Phys.org
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