> “The bar-heads have done that migration for millions of years before the Himalayas were as tall as they are now, and the birds have been pushed as the mountains have moved up to go higher and higher,” says coauthor Julia York, now a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, in an interview with the Times. York, who played foster parent to seven geese, adds, “They’re amazing athletes.”
It wasn't that particular species at the time but a precursor.
Your grandad is/was hom. sap. sap. but your (50,000,000 / 20)th grandad was one of quite a few possibilities, mostly ape and no sign of homo. I'm using a simple 20 year per generation model here. That's 2,500,000 generations ago. Here in the UK on telly, a comedian was shown how his (2021 - 1239) / 20 = 39 or so generational ancestor was English King Edward I - "longshanks". 39 generations gets you to 1230 or so, 2,500,000 generations is quite a long time ago.
So, let's look at these geese. 50M years back, the "dinosaurs" flying that route - let's call them "Goosey" - already had phenomenally efficient lungs compared to say mammals. As the land rose, they simply adapted a bit. Given how efficient their lungs are I doubt there was much to do.
It looks miraculous to us but we don't have those lungs. We didn't evolve the double ended lungs and hollow bones etc because we simply didn't need them or the cost of some part of that mix was detrimental for our use case or "we" simply rolled a double three. Evolution is weird. Well, no it isn't, that implies a blind watchmaker/intelligent design or nonsense as I prefer to call it.
In the words of a famous bloke: "Evolution is as evolution does". No more and no less. There are some geese that are able to fly over some mountains.
The claim specifically said "bar-headed geese", though. That's a concrete species, not just some random evolutionary ancestor.
> 50M years back, the "dinosaurs" flying that route - let's call them "Goosey" - already had phenomenally efficient lungs compared to say mammals. As the land rose, they simply adapted a bit. Given how efficient their lungs are I doubt there was much to do. ... It looks miraculous to us but we don't have those lungs. We didn't evolve the double ended lungs and hollow bones etc because we simply didn't need them or the cost of some part of that mix was detrimental for our use case or "we" simply rolled a double three.
Are you saying that the Himalayas drove the development of birds world-wide? But despite that, we can only observe it in one species today? That makes even less sense to me.
The Himalayas formed fifty millions years ago. Geese apparently appeared ten million years ago. How would this be possible?