Min Wang |
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The ancient bird is 120 million years old.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id—Archaeologists found fossil small 120 million years old in northeast China. These animals are not birds or dinosaurs, but an evolution between the two. in the journal Nature Communications, the skull of this small ancient animal has a length of about two centimeters.
This animal also has similarities to much larger dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus rex. This can be seen from its thin and smooth body, more like modern-day birds—such as sparrows or hummingbirds.
Scan results using CT scan and reconstruction fossil details show that this strange bird species was once part of an ancient bird group called enantiornithine, or “birds oppsite”.
Several other enantiornithines that have been discovered are no bigger than a cockroach. While the findings fossil This new one is slightly larger, equivalent to the palm of a human hand. Despite their small size, these clawed and winged animals were among the most abundant and diverse group of ancient birds living at the time.
The Enantiornithines did not survive the Mesozoic mass extinction event. However, many of their traits are still alive today and they are considered an important evolutionary step on the way to modern birds.
Paleontologist from Chinese Academy of Sciences. Min Wang said that having a ‘dinosaur’ skull on a bird’s body certainly didn’t stop enantiornithin, or other ancient birds.
Fossil in early birds this is very unique and very well preserved. Unlike modern birds, whose upper jaws move independently of their brain receptacle, known as cranial ‘kinesis’, the bones in this newly discovered skull were “locked” and immovable.
They even show attachment points for jaw muscles, which are typically found in dinosaurs and reptiles, such as lizards and crocodiles.
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Min Wang |
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Fossils of ancient birds like T-rex.
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“One bone in particular, known as a pterygoid, looks exactly like the Dromaeosaur Linheraptor,” according to Wang.
The Linheraptor dinosaurs were bird-like theropods, an extinct group of dinosaurs that also included meat-eaters such as T. rex and Velociraptor. In fact, the back of the skull of this ancient bird looked more like a raptor than a living bird.
This suggests that ancient birds could have evolved from a branch of dinosaurs that included the feathered Velociraptor and the winged Microraptor.
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Linheraptor exquisite Geological time: Late Cretaceous, 75 Ma, found in Mongolia, China.
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“In combination with the ‘locked’ temporal bone, differences in palate structure also suggest an absence of kinesis among ancient birds,” said paleontologist Thomas Stidham of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Therefore, this skull movement must have evolved later, leading to the great diversity of skull shapes we now see among modern crowned birds.
“Despite their global conquest and success through the Cretaceous, only the crown group of birds with their derived feature set, which enabled and encouraged cranial kinesis, survived the late Mesozoic mass extinction, and has been evolving ever since,” conclude the authors.
Also Read: New Dinosaur Species Discovered, Becomes Australia’s Biggest Find
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