abstract
| - In our home timeline, of all dinosaurs only a few species of Neornithes survived the end of the Cretaceous. Those few species all seem to have lived in Antarctica or perhaps its surrounding landmasses of South America, Madagascar-India and Aotearoa. Therefore it is no wonder that Home-Earth’s birds are all so similar – all our birds have descended from one small handful of species that has survived the end-Cretaceous apocalypse. In Spec, where the Earth ticked through the Cretaceous-Cenozoic boundary with only the mildest of hiccups, most of the other bird clades still exist. Most notable among these are the Enantiornithes, which have enjoyed a global distribution more or less since the age of their oldest fossil representative, some 135 million years ago. These “opposite-birds”, so called for some skeletal features which are built the opposite way compared to Euornithes, make up most of Spec’s landbird diversity, with a few water-loving forms thrown in just to disturb the picture.
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