The impact that wiped out the dinosaurs also wiped out all songbirds, except for in (ark) Australia. Australian songbirds then spread out to rest of the planet.

The closest living descendents (aka basal lineages) are the Lyrebird and the Rufus scrub bird. The lyrebird's song is a mixture of its own song and other birds songs. They have been also been known to mimic chainsaws, car alarms, camera shutters, and human speech.

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[–] 9 points 9 months ago (5 children)

There's plenty of convergent evolution. Plants keep evolving into trees, so there isn't a single origin for them. Crustaceans keep evolving into crabs.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    There’s a single origin for everything. It doesn’t matter how many times the descendants of that common ancestor have diverged and reconverged.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago (1 child)
    1. You're talking about a different subject than me.
    2. There's no consensus for what you're saying.

    1: You're talking about whether a common ancestor exists for all life, I'm talking about common ancestor for a trait (e.g. tree bark, bird song, these are traits and not organisms).

    2: There's current debate on whether life emerged multiple times or if it was only once. There's evidence for both and it's not a settled debate.

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  • [–] 1 point 9 months ago
    1. If that’s so, then that’s not what you said. You said “plants keep evolving into trees”. While it’s true that we give the name “trees” to a variety of plants with different genetics, all of them share a common ancestor: otherwise they wouldn’t be plants but something else.
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