If the dinsaurs were wiped out, why do we still have birds?

Well, here's something I have never thought about. Although it wasn't the case back in my childhood, it is pretty well known today that birds are closely related to dinosaurs, indeed that they are essentially modern-day dinos walking - and flying - among us. Recent, more careful, excavations of dinosaur remains, show quite clearly that many dinosaurs were feathered.

So, why weren't birds wiped out along with the dinosaurs 65-66 million years ago? Well, it's not the case that birds evolved AFTER the cataclysmic events of 65 million years ago. Neither did a few dinosaurs manage to survive and evolved into birds. 

In fact, birds were a sub-group of dinosaurs. In the same way as some dinos developed hugely long necks, and some developed amour-plating, some developed feathers and learned to fly. Birds were contemporaries of the lizard-like dinosaurs we usually think of, first showing up in the fossil record sone 150 million years ago in the Jurassic period. They flourished alongside T. Rex and Diplodocus, in another branch of the dinosaurs family tree. 

Some of the traits they developed - like feathers, warm blood, egg-laying, air sacs, seed-eating, and parental care - apparently allowed them to better weather the annihilation suffered by their saurian relatives after the ecosystem collapse caused by an asteroid strike (although very many species did NOT make it through). 

So, birds simply got lucky. And they are the dinosaurs that survive to this day.