Birds first showed up on the paleontological scene around 150 million years ago, making their debut with toothsome terrors like Archaeopteryx that likely resembled their more reptilian-looking dinosaurian ancestors, reports George Dvorsky for Gizmodo. Sometime during the Cretaceous, though, our feathered friends began to shed their teeth, bony tails and clawed wings in favor of more docile traits. But evidence of these ancient avians has been scant, leaving a gaping hole in the origin story of modern birds.
However, the descendants of this diminutive beinga recently discovered fossil drolly named Wonderchickenlived on, contributing to the genesis of the resilient, varied avian ancestry that continues to grace the skies of the contemporary world.
Roughly 66. A small, quail-sized bird met an unfortunate and untimely end 8 million years ago, not long before the end-Cretaceous extinction that wiped out all non-avian dinosaurs.
This is an incredibly informative specimen, Amy Balanoff, a paleontologist at Johns Hopkins University who wasnt involved in the work, tells Gretchen Vogel at Science magazine. It gives us some clues about what characteristics were key in surviving that catastrophic event.
A bird known as Vegavis iaai, which lived in the Cretaceous and left a trail of bones in the rocks of what is now Antarctica, is known to have looked at least as modern as Wonderchicken. It lived some 200,000 or 300,000 years after Wonderchicken. According to the Guardian, Asteriornis, which was extracted from European sediments, broadens our understanding of the history of birds and raises the possibility that modern birds originated in the north rather than the south. The new research suggests that birds may have developed certain critical features just in timethat is, hundreds of thousands of years before that fateful space rock crashed into Earththough more fossils may eventually change the picture.
The first birds had sharp teeth, long bony tails and claws on their hands. The clear distinction we see between living birds and other animals did not exist with early birds.
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- Updated
- 02/12/20
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In actuality, the earliest birds resembled tiny dinosaurs more than any modern bird.
Although birds had already evolved before the 150 million-year-old Archaeopteryx, it is the earliest known bird (based on fossils). Soon after Archaeopteryx, a variety of birds with more evolved features appeared. During the Late Cretaceous, one group gave rise to contemporary birds. Thus, prehistoric birds, early modern birds, and dinosaurs that resembled birds coexisted for a while.
Two examples of early birds are:
Archaeopteryx drawing by Dr Anne Musser
Several characteristics of Archaeopteryx are absent from contemporary birds, such as:
- jaws with teeth
- claws on hands
- long, bony tail
An early bird called Confuciusornis lived in China 125 million years ago. It had many primitive features including claws on the wings. It was one of the first known birds to have a shortened bony tail and a toothless beak, giving it more advanced features than Archaeopteryx. It also had feathers suited for flight. Confuciusornis fossils were the subject of a melanosome study that revealed the species had dark feathers on its body and dark and white feathers on its wings.
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