@MontereyJack,
hmm, The age relationship seems to put it a bit late to be an actual transition (Im not sure that's where the article is going anyway). Ever since, due to the clot of new bird-like dinosaurs from the mid Jurassic of N China, we have a "problem of a wealth of fossils".
Archeopteryx has definitely been taken off the "dawn bird list" and is , instead, considered a "bird -like reptile".
Archeopteryx (and
Xiaotingia zhengi or
Epidexipteryx hui are a large cluster of Dromeaosaurs that were getting more and more bird-like back in the late Jurassic.
I hope theres a picture of the new one from the Cretaceous because that would need to be either a "left over bird like dinosaur" that didn't bother going extinct yet , or it was a bird like dinosaur that was from a whole new line of adaptees.
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BTW- The Jurassic and Cretaceous beds ofthis area of China were actually a major source of all kinds of fossil specimens that were discovered by Japanese scientists prior to and during WWII, when Japan overran the area. The fossil discoveries were lost for over 40 years following the war and new finds weren't really made until the early 1990's by Chinese scientists.
The entire faunal assemblage from the very late Jurassic through early Cretaceous is known as the JEHOL Faunal assemblage and is a regionally unique chronostratigraphic unit that we use for "indexing" (which is geojargon for " lets try to find where the hell we are"). This area and especially the Jehol were long known (based mostly on fossil nautiloids) as source beds for potential gas recovery. The gas recovery has yet to be begun and this area will be a boomer in years to come because its nicely bound on the bottom by hard dense volcanic rocks that define a huge resource basin.
Sometimes all these fossils can cause years of confusion and arguments at conferences.
If you see a picture of the fossil (there was one in the Washington Post a few weeks ago but it was very crappy)
