Bird, meet cousin alligator
Birds and alligators have little in common, other than that the first is sometimes the other’s lunch. That hasn’t always been the case, though, and that’s what attracts Arkhat Abzhanov. Alligators and birds are part of the same larger group, called archosaurs, which has existed for 250 million years and which has given rise not only to birds and crocodilians, but also to dinosaurs. Though dinosaurs are now extinct, the crocodilians, such as alligators, crocodiles, and narrow-jawed gharials live on, and scientists see in them many characteristics of the primitive archosaurs. To Abzhanov, an assistant professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard who studies birds and how they developed, researching alligators gives him the chance to compare birds to something akin to their ancestors. “It’s really about opening a door to understand what happened in avian evolution to come up with their unique body plan,” Abzhanov said. “How did it evolve? What...