New Bird Species Found in China.
EVOLUTIONWorking together on fossilized remains, Chinese and U.S. researchers have discovered a previously unknown species of primitive bird, a finding that offers new evidence that early bird evolution was considerably more complex than previously believed. In the process, the scientists have identified the world's oldest surviving horny beak on its nearly complete skeleton, part of a fossil dating back some 130,000,000 years. They maintain that this adds more weight to the argument that birds descended not from dinosaurs, but from unknown earlier reptilian ancestors.
"One of the really interesting things about these discoveries is that they unexpectedly and vividly show that birds had already diversified by the late Jurassic-early Cretaceous period," notes Alan Feduccia, chair of biology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. "The oldest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which dates to 150,000,000 years ago, had no beak, but, rather, a very reptilian jaw with teeth."
The researchers have named the new species Confuciusornis dui in honor of Wenya Du, the man who collected the specimen near the edge of a lake in northeast China's Liaoning Province and donated it to the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing. It is a smaller, but close, relative of Confuciusomis sanctus, another crow-like bird of the same age the researchers found in 1995.
Because hundreds of specimens of C. sanctus have been found in the same area, it is theorized that volcanic eruptions likely killed them along the lakeshore instantaneously and froze them in time, Feduccia says. The new species was an unexpected, but pleasant, surprise. "This bird was more advanced than Archaeopteryx in that it had a beak, but was less advanced in that it had two small openings in the rear of its skull very similar to the reptile progenitors of birds. This is a mosaic pattern we see very much in vertebrate evolution--in other words, various lineages showing both primitive and advanced features at the same time. What this really shows is that early bird evolution was not linear, as many people have depicted it, but, rather, a far more complicated `bush' with many extinct lines."
Neither of the two species likely were ancestors of modern birds. Instead, they were side `"twigs" that disappeared from their family tree--or bush--millions of years ago. Males of both species bore two long tail plumes, indicating the sexes differed significantly from each other. Like its cousin, the C. dui grew asymmetric wing feathers characteristic of all modern flying birds. Ostriches and other birds that can't fly well sprout nearly symmetric feathers incapable of creating an airfoil and, hence, lift.
"These birds also have highly curved foot claws and reversed big toes, showing they were clearly tree-dwelling creatures," Feduccia points out. "Together, these and other characteristics--and the fact that the birds lived in complex social colonies--show that they were pretty well-developed. It seems to us that this was a tree-dwelling bird, not an earthbound, feathered dinosaur as people advocating a dinosaur origin of birds have said."
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| Publication: | USA Today (Magazine) |
|---|---|
| Article Type: | Brief Article |
| Geographic Code: | 9CHIN |
| Date: | Jun 1, 2000 |
| Words: | 499 |
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