PBS Nova: Dino birds part 2

Monday, July 27, 2026 9:09

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Saw the trailer
on Facebook. The program is online here. It’s been around since 2025.

PBS NOVA Dinobirds 55 minute video
Season 52, episode 3. Stephen Brusatte still promoting his book here, along with ‘a new breed of scientists.’ Answering the question, how did birds alone survive the asteroid impact?

Spoiler alert: the experts have no idea and their speculation goes awry.

The show pays homage to TH Huxley.
That’s laudable. Then interviewed workers explain that dinosaurs lacked a furcula, so could not have preceded birds.

Never mind the size, shape, other bones and feathers.
This speaks volumes about something called ‘attitude’.
This is ‘Pulling a Larry Martin’ to the extreme. All to common in paleo.

Figure 1. Asteriornis, a 3D bird fossil from the Latest Cretaceous, now nests with Cnemiornis, a giant flightless goose, in the LRT.

PhD Daniel Field used µCT scans
to envision Asteriornis (Fig 1) a derived bird: a goose in the large reptile tree (LRT, 2340 taxa). Field called this Late Cretaceous (67mya) bird a ‘generalist feeder.’

The show glosses over the fact that Asteriornis was a pre-asteroid goose (see figure 7).

We only have one fossil
of pre-asteroid Asteriornis. Geese are highly derived in the bird family tree. The last common ancestor of living birds is Early Cretaceous Archaeorhynchus. That gives birds the entire Cretaceous to radiate and diversity – despite the paucity of fossils at present.

Antarctica was warm when the asteroid hit – not ice covered. From such geographic refugia arose today’s living birds. That’s how we get penguins so early in the Cenozoic.

PhD Eric Jarvis used gene studies to create a molecular clock,
estimating modern birds arose 90mya.

Better to use phylogenetic analysis to pinpoint the exact extinct bird that gave rise to extant birds. This is one of the many shortcomings of deep time gene studies.

Figure 2. Yutyrannus nests not with tyrannosaurs but with allosaurs. And it is feathered.

The show wonders, ‘where did feathers come from’?
The show focuses on Chinese fossils, again, ignoring Archaeopteryx (Fig 3) from 1860. The show focuses on Yutyrannus (Fig 2), with feathers more like long hairs.

Half-way through the presentation 25:30
the show still pays no attention to the headline topic: “how did birds alone survive among all the dinosaurs?”

Figure 3. The London specimen of Archaeopteryx and Baminornis to scale. The London specimen is related to Heperornis, a Cretaceous bird with vestigial forelimbs. Note the furcula and elongate coracoid.

Which dinosaurs could fly? is the next topic
The show portrays a poorly feathered Archaeopteryx beating its wings at about one flap/second. This is wrong. Fying birds of that size flap so often the wings are a blur.

Then the show portrays Archaeopteryx as a tree-climber
in order to glide. This is also wrong for the same reason.

No one, it seems, pays attention to the elongation and immobilization of the coracoids (Figs 3, 4), which make room for flapping muscles and characterize all flapping birds, fenestrasaurs + pterosaurs and bats, which substitute a long clavicle.

Figure 4. Cosesaurus flapping, perhaps too slowly here.

Learning to flap @29:00
Birds did not ‘learn’ to flap. They were flapping before they could fly, shooing off predators, displaying for mates, acting as aerodynamic brakes, as in Cosesaurus (Fig 4), a pre-pterosaur with dinosaur-like proportions and pterosaur-like bits and pieces.

Figure 5. Tapejara poling while floating, producing manus-only tracks, all to scale.

The Las Hoyas Formation is shown @ 32:40.
I”ve never seen that before. Fascinating. Surprisingly small. About the size of private swimming pool. Eoalulavis is shown next. Then Europejara, a tapejarid pterosaur (Fig 5) known from a partial skeleton is shown, but not compared.

Figure 6. Click to enlarge. Origin of birds from Archaeopteryx to Megapodius.

The asteroid appears @ 3:30.
The nararator reports that only the smallest birds survived the impact. This is wrong. According to the LRT the earliest tested crown birds were all megapodes or megapode-like. The latter category incudes the kiwi, Apteryx. The African secretary bird, Sagittarius, gave rise to South American terror birds, so it survived, towering over megapodes and tinamous.

Once again, build your own LRT so you, too, will have the authority to debunk current speculation. Phylogenetic analysis based on traits is a powerful tool that cannot be corrupted by viral injection.

Fig. 7. Janavis compared to Asterornis to scale. Remember, Asteriornis was not a little songbird. It was a small-headed goose in the LRT. This exercise demonstrates the value of testing, which is on the list of the scientific method. Don’t take their word for it. Test them.

The ?toothed seabird, Janavis, appears @39:00.
It is compared to the much ?smaller Asteriornis (Fig 7). PBS took liberties here, with academic approval, claiming that the small-headed Cretaceous goose, Asteriornis survived the asteroid because it was so much smaller. Not really, after testing. They were similar in size.

C’mon academics, do better!

Daniel Field then follows with pure speculation
regarding the feeding requirement of one large bird vs the other ‘small’ bird (Fig 7).

Complete devastation vs a brand new world brimming with opportunities.
Both scenarios are posited after the asteroid, one following the other.

Listen to what they say. Rare geographic refuges apart from the mass devastation are not mentioned. Being small does not protect you from asteroids, fires, darkness, etc.

Giant Gasterornis is added as a postscript
Phylogenetic analysis nests it as a giant flightless parrot. You don’t have to test it further. Even so, chemical analysis (described in the program) labeled it an herbivore, not a predator. Phylogenetic analysis goes one step further in nesting Gaterornis among the parrots.

An earlier review of this PBS NOVA program was posted here in 2025.

Figure 8. Penguin origins according to the LRT. Here, on a hunch, the basal tinamou, Pseudocrypterus, is added to scale. The thought crossed my mind that maybe penguins developed earlier from tinamous like Pseudocrypterus based on the overall Bauplan are striking. The details have, so far, separated them in the LRT. Thalasseus is a seabird, as are penguins. Tinamous are not.

In conclusion
the academics and PBS Nova put all their eggs into size and diet as keys to understanding how crown birds survived while ?bigger birds and dinosaurs expired following the asteroid. The present evidence shows their arguments were cherry-picked, flimsy, whimsical and overlooked the fact that the planet Earth is a very big place with some latitudes and locations that apparently did not suffer as much from the after effects of the impact.

A better, more comprehensive answer may be waiting to be discovered.

References
.pbs.org/video/dino-birds-