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What do birds, mammals, and reptiles all have in common?

We're amniotes, meaning we develop in a fluid-filled egg covered in a membrane.

That allows us to develop outside of water, unlike, say, a fish.

And that means we all have a common ancestor that branched out into other species

that researchers think probably lived over 300 million years ago.

And was probably similar to an amphibian, with some key differences.

But it already had some specializations, like a different skin, specialized lungs or brains, etc.

Fernando Garcia Moreno is an evolutionary and developmental neurobiologist.

He says for a long time there's been a debate about how amniote brains, like birds and mammals,

evolved and what makes them similar.

One brain structure called the pallium has been seen as a comparable structure in birds, mammals, and reptiles.

In every case, in all these species, the pallium is in charge of high task and high hierarchical

tasks such as cognitive processing, sensorial processing, motor control, also language, for instance, in the case of mammals and birds.

In mammals, the structure is near the top of the brain. It's sometimes called the cerebral cortex.

And it includes an area called the neocortex, plus some other key structures.

The hippocampus, which is in charge of memory, for instance, memory processing, or the amygdala,

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