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Evolution: prehistory

According to palaeontologists, birds detached in evolution from the reptiles about 200 million years ago.
By the significant difference that birds, as contrasted to reptiles, do have feathers, they can renew them every year. This in opposite to the flying reptiles (and the modern bat too, who belongs to the mammals) who can not repair the eventual damage on their wing-membranes. Birds renew their feathers every year during moulting-time.

When birds already lived 100 million years on earth, the evolution of penguins started 65 million years ago and ended 45 million years ago in the late Eocene. As it happens to be the age of the oldest penguin fossils ever found. These fossils have all the same characteristics as we know from modern penguins. When we compare this with human prehistory, we are only "babies" because we are just about 2 à 3 million years existent.

next chapter: development
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