By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A fragile but exquisitely preserved skull of a crow-sized bird that lived in Madagascar 68 million years ago is showing scientists that they are learning a lot about avian diversity in the dinosaur era.
Scientists said on Wednesday that the bird, called Faltectelli forestry, had a face unlike other birds known from the dinosaur era – the Mesozoic era – not only because of its beak shape but also because of its anatomy.
Its beak looked superficially like a small touch, although the two species are not related to each other. While modern birds exhibit beak-shaped variations – from sword-billed hummingbirds to rhino hornbills – such variations were rarely found in Mesozoic birds.
The Faltec ly-Lee -.- inch (- cm) skull remains partially embedded in the rock because scientists did not want to risk damaging it. Instead they analyzed it using sophisticated scanning and digital reconstruction. Only his skull was found.
“Amazing, small, delicate, delicate, challenging to study – at the same time,” said Patrick O’Connor, anatomy professor at Ohio University, lead author of the research, published in the journal Nature.
Lone Turner, a paleontologist at Stony Brook University in New York and author of the study, added, “Bird remains are especially rare in parts because they have such fragile skeletons.” Hollow bones are not great for surviving in the fossil process. “
“Because of this, we need to keep in mind that we are probably sampling the mesozoic diversity of oz birds. Taste the possibility of a variety of forms while waiting to discover newly discovered species such as Falcatecli,” Turner said. .
Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs about 150 million years ago. Early birds retained many ancestral features, including teeth. The fossilized fossil has a conical tooth at the front of the upper jaw. Faltectelli probably had the lowest number of teeth in life.
It belonged to the Avian group, the Antioarthins, which, 66ret million years ago, could not survive the event of mass extinction, ending the Cretaceous period.
“Unlike ancient birds like the archeopteryx, which in many ways still looked dinosaurian with their long tails and incredible snouts, antiornothins like Faltec at Lee looked relatively modern,” Turner said.
It was in the structure of the underlying skeleton where its differences were more pronounced, O’Connor added, more resemblance to dinosaurs like velociraptors than to modern birds.
(Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Jonathan Otis)
