Reply
Wed 14 Dec, 2005 10:45 am
125 Million Year Old Bird Fossil Found
Scientists have discovered the nearly complete skeleton and full plumage of a previously unknown bird that lived approximately 125 million years ago in China.
This new species, Hongshanornis longicresta, is one of the earliest known birds to have a full beak and no teeth. Its discoverers, Zhonghe Zhou and Fucheng Zhang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, found that an imprint of the bird's skeleton and plumage was preserved unusually well in the sandstone of Inner Mongolia in northeastern China.
This small relative of modern birds, which was named for the area's early Chinese society and the bird's distinctive raised crest, appears to have had long legs, short wings, and a pointed beak. Researchers believe H. longicresta lived by lakeshores, where it waded through marshes, fed on fish in the shallow waters, and evaded predators by quickly taking flight with its slim wings.
The discovery of this bird near an ancient lakeshore confirms that the aquatic environment played a key role in the origin and evolution of early birds, of which one branch eventually gave rise to existing birds near the Cretaceous/Tertiary boundary. It also provides information for understanding the differentiation in morphology, body size, and diet of the Early Cretaceous birds.
This research is detailed in this week's online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
--Bjorn Carey
·http://www.livescience.com/imageoftheday/siod_051214.html
Credit: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
An incredible find that fully-developed birds co-existed with the dinosuars in the early Cretaceous.
I'm trying to remember the name of the toothed bird of the cretaceous, the one with the plumage, but it slips me. Can you refresh my memory? I want to compare its timeframe with Hongshanornis.
maybe this picture will show..
that is a GREAT photo..
They are taking the piss.It's the birds in the disco that you want to concentrate on.
Amazing how the plumage has shown up in the rock like that. It looks as though the wings are pretty small in proportion to the body, makes me wonder if it really could get airborne.
Re: 125 Million Year Old Bird Fossil Found
bobsmythhawk wrote:125 Million Year Old Bird Fossil Found
Uh on, Gunga and RL will be convinced that this is the end of evolution.
stuh505 wrote:Amazing how the plumage has shown up in the rock like that. It looks as though the wings are pretty small in proportion to the body, makes me wonder if it really could get airborne.
There are snakes, frogs, possums and lizards that successfully glide - and they seem to lack those 'wings'. Maybe this is one of the sort of 'gliders', it will join those other
not-airborne birds, the albatross and the condor.....
Hi coluber2001. I'm sure Archaeopteryx is what you mean.
Archaeopteryx lithographica, a Jurassic fossil with both bird and dinosaur features, is widely accepted as the earliest and most primitive known bird. The discovery of the first intact specimen in 1861, two years after Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, set off a firestorm of debate about evolution and the role of transitional fossils that endures to this day.
Over the years, ten specimens of Archaeopteryx have been found. "All ten fossils were found in a limestone deposit near Solnhofen, Germany." [1] The fine-grained limestone, which preserves detailed casts of features not often fossilized, is used by artists and printers for lithographic plates, thus the species name lithographica.
coluber2001 wrote:An incredible find that fully-developed birds co-existed with the dinosuars in the early Cretaceous.
I'm trying to remember the name of the toothed bird of the cretaceous, the one with the plumage, but it slips me. Can you refresh my memory? I want to compare its timeframe with Hongshanornis.
Archaeopteryx was from around 145mya and protoavis was from around 225mya (although protoavis is still controversial).
The fossils on this most recent bird seem almost too good to me. I'm suspicious of them until they have been verified by multiple sources.
And it's about 124.995 years older than the anti-evolution nuts say that the world is.
This was translated from German:
Paläornithologie
The oldest primordial bird dug out
Researchers have discovered the fossil of an up to now unknown bird from the early chalk time. Hongshanornis longicresta has before possibly...
Here:
Science of the earth
Pretty blow of beak
The fossil of the bird of Crétacé Hongshanornis longicresta. (Zhou, Zhang, PNAS)
The fossil of a still unknown kind of bird dating from the Cretaceous was discovered in China, in internal Mongolia, not far from the province of Liaoning, the " gold mine " of fossils with feathers. Hongshanornis longicresta comes to enrich a catalogue already well provided with about twenty kinds of birds brought to light in this region of the world. Since the beginning of the nineties a very rich expulsion went out so little by little of sediments of Liaoning and neighbouring regions.
The bird represented by Zhonghe Zhou and Fucheng Zhang today in PNAS lived 125 million years ago on the edges of a lake or in a marshy zone. Hongshanornis longicresta was probably a wader, write both researchers. The bird, which belongs to the group of ornithurines, had long legs, a comparatively small body, a gourmet and devoid
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace