About bird..

Birds, also known as Aves or avian dinosaurs, are a group of endothermic vertebrates, characterised
by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-
chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweight skeleton. Birds live worldwide and range in size from
the 5 cm (2 in) bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m (9 ft) ostrich. They rank as the world's most
numerically-successful class of tetrapods, with approximately ten thousand living species, more than
half of these being passerines, sometimes known as perching birds. Birds have wings which are more
or less developed depending on the species; the only known groups without wings are the extinct
moa and elephant birds. Wings, which evolved from forelimbs, gave birds the ability to fly, although
further evolution has led to the loss of flight in flightless birds, including ratites, penguins, and
diverse endemic island species of birds. The digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also
uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and
some waterbirds, have further evolved for swimming.

The fossil record demonstrates that birds are modern feathered dinosaurs, having evolved from
earlier feathered dinosaurs within the theropod group, which are traditionally placed within the
saurischian dinosaurs. The closest living relatives of birds are the crocodilians. Primitive bird-like
dinosaurs that lie outside class Aves proper, in the broader group Avialae, have been found dating
back to the mid-Jurassic period, around 170 million years ago. Many of these early "stem-birds",
such as Archaeopteryx, retained primitive characteristics such as teeth and long bony tails. DNA-
based evidence finds that birds diversified dramatically around the time of the Cretaceous–
Palaeogene extinction event 66 million years ago, which killed off the pterosaurs and all the non-
avian dinosaur lineages. But birds, especially those in the southern continents, survived this event
and then migrated to other parts of the world while diversifying during periods of global cooling.
This makes them the sole surviving dinosaurs according to cladistics.