Low, T. 2014. Where Song Began: Australia’s birds and how they changed the world. Melbourne, Australia: Viking

Abstract

 In Where Song Began , Tim Low tells us

that he decided to write the book because of

one opposite of song: silence ; the silence of

the ornithological community about the recent

revolution in our understanding of birds.

For most of the Twentieth Century, it was

believed that birds originated in Europe. There

was good reason for this: the oldest known bird,

which looked much like a dinosaur, is Archaeopteryx

lithographica , described by Meyer in

1861. It lived in Germany during the Jurassic,

150 million years ago and no older, uncontestable

bird fossils have ever been found.