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YSK - All song birds on the planet are descended from ancestors in Australia.
(www.penguin.com.au)
TIL, not YSK
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2026
225 points (96.7% liked)
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You should know! I consider it important information that is necessary for life, as now you get to imagine every songbird tossing in a "cunt" or "good on ya" while twittering away.
My thought is that it also implies that there's a good chance dinosaurs sang.
A brightly feathered, singing T-Rex is the thought I can't stop giggling about.
I was considering deleting this because of some reports but you know what? Miles O'Brien has a point, the post stands. Carry on and thank you for your service to Starfleet.
Equally valid as both
Love it. I will from now on imagine every song bird as singing in an Australian accent.
Every morning they're screaming "g'day, mate!"
More like “Wanna root?”
They're screaming something! Torresian Crows, Pied Currawongs, Noisy Miners, every morning they're around my yard yelling at the top of their little lungs!
I’ve got a gaggle of kookaburras in the neighborhood too. Only a few lorikeets and an occasional cockatoo.
I mean not to nitpick but there are (were?) hundreds of aboriginal languages, none of which were related to the colonialist accent. And they were there for like thousands of years. So like fuck these birds if they’re speaking English tbh
To suggest a bird should confirm to a culture is insane. To the birds, both indigenous and colonial cultures would be a drop in the ocean compared to what they've seen.
Sorry, it was tongue in cheek! But Christ now I wonder what they’ve seen o_0
To be fair, all birds who went extinct back then also still had a common ancestor somewhere, all life on earth does.
There's plenty of convergent evolution. Plants keep evolving into trees, so there isn't a single origin for them. Crustaceans keep evolving into crabs.
Always and eternal is the carsinisation cycle. One glorious day we too will realize the optimal form and shuffle sideways into Nirvana. Together, as a species, we will snip the ties of suffering that bind us to this samsara.
Craaab people, craaab people♫
There’s a single origin for everything. It doesn’t matter how many times the descendants of that common ancestor have diverged and reconverged.
- You're talking about a different subject than me.
- There's no consensus for what you're saying.
1: You're talking about whether a common ancestor exists for all life, I'm talking about common ancestor for a trait (e.g. tree bark, bird song, these are traits and not organisms).
2: There's current debate on whether life emerged multiple times or if it was only once. There's evidence for both and it's not a settled debate.
- If that’s so, then that’s not what you said. You said “plants keep evolving into trees”. While it’s true that we give the name “trees” to a variety of plants with different genetics, all of them share a common ancestor: otherwise they wouldn’t be plants but something else.
So, what about Australia made all the birds sing?
screaming out of anxiety at all the stuff that can kill them.
but in a pretty soprano voice
Being far away from chicxulub
Imagine a 10' tall lyrebird roaming free thru the streets....honking, pretending to be a camera, an ambulance, a fire truck.
At night it keeps repeating parts of the news...."and the president will invade Eur! And the p..."
My best guess is that's why we don't see any of those things these days. Someone or something got pissed.
... What?
Song birds must have been much larger in prehistoric times I assume. Maybe not 11' tall but what about the size of a crow or a dog? Imagine chirping so loud you can still hear it if you close your doors.
Australia has song birds about the size of a crow, they're called Magpies. They are at times aggressively territorial, extremely intelligent, family orientated and very pleasant to wake up to in the morning.
Occasionally silly https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hu3hrXjMtNI
Occasionally terrifying https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EXYf2DTOsvI
Song at 1:23 of the second video.
Yeah, like that, but with constant song bird singing.
Thought the thumbnail said Song Bogan.
That's nice and all for a science or bird community. Not here, though.