Despite an incredible number of visible differences, modern-day crocodiles and birds share a common ancestor dating back to the Early Triassic. Paleontologists call them archosaurs: a hardy clade of reptiles that toughed it out through the sulfurous, inhospitable years of the Great Dying that followed the Permian–Triassic extinction event roughly 250 million years ago.
Scientists had long assumed that the critical juncture marking archosaurs’ evolutionary split on their separate journeys toward birds and crocs was the moment that birds’ avian-like ancestors first became warm-blooded—but it turns out they were wrong. Crocodiles’ ancient…
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