The discovery of a so-called “buck-tooth-toothed” animal that lived about 68 million years ago has raised speculations about the diversity of birds that live with dinosaurs.
In less than nine centimeters (3.5 inches), the fragile skull of ornithologists has been dubbed. Falkatkeli Forster Will be easily ignored.
In fact, it was almost, after years of sitting in the backlog of excavated remains, that CT scanning suggested that more attention should be paid to the specimen.
It turns out that its tall, odd-looking beak, while resembling a tuk-tuk, is something never seen before in fossil records.
Faltakatelli Forster Art Reconstruction. (Mark Witton)
Birds of the Mesozoic era – 250 million to 65 million years ago – were “relatively unpredictable snouts”, Patrick O’Connor, lead author of the study on the new animal, told AFP.
O’Connor, a professor of anatomy and neuroscience at Ohio University, added:
Skull, described in a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Another surprise offer.
While the face of the falcon is quite familiar to us with modern birds such as modern canes and hornbills, the bones on its face bear little resemblance to those modern creatures.
Remains skull Falkatkeli Forster. (O’Connor et al., Nature, 2020)
“Despite the overall face shape of modern birds such as T-cans, the underlying skeleton is more similar to that of non-avian theropod dinosaurs such as Diononicus and Velosiraptor,” O’Connor said.
It “turns out what we know about Mesozoic Bird Anatomy.”
‘Almost ridiculous profile’
Mentioning these features was not an easy task.
Fossil origins were collected in 2010 in northwestern Madagascar.
When researchers finally turned their attention to it seven years later, they encountered a problem: the skull and beak were too fragile for the test to be performed.
So the team used a form of high-resolution imaging and digital modeling to “virtually dissect” the bones.
They then used 3D printers to recreate the skull and compare it with other known species.
According to Daniel Field of the Department of Earth Sciences at Cambridge University, what they discovered was an almost tangentially improbable animal that reviewed the study. Nature.
It’s not just an unexpected bill, but also the fact that the fossil beak is tipped with a single preserved tooth, probably one of many birds.
“These features give an almost ridiculous outline to a falcon’s skull – imagine a small, buck-tooth-like creature,” Field writes.
He added that the skulls of any of the nearly 200 bird species known since this period were not like “anything like Faltakatelli”.
For octopuses, the discovery is evidence of potentially huge gaps in our knowledge of birds living with dinosaurs.
“There is a period of more than 100 million years where we know nothing further about avian evolutionary history,” he said.
It is comparatively rare to find intact fossils of birds from that period because their lightweight skeletons are usually very fragile so they are well preserved.
The research team, working in the area of Madagascar where Falcatekli was found in the mid-1990s, has continued excavations, and O’Keefe is excited about what else to discover.
He also hopes to explore why Faltectelli did the beak.
Onconor said, “Is it related to the processing of food? Receiving prey? Is it used as a signal by other members of the species? Many questions remain,” O’Connor said.
ન્સી Agency France-Press
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