67-million-year-old fossil turned up the theory of bird evolution

The fragments of an ancient bird skull found in Belgium suggest that prehistoric birds could move the “upper beak”, like most modern birds. Most of the current birds have a hinged attachment of the upper jaw to the cranial box, which allows the upper half of their beak to move freely, but in some non -altogether birds, such as emu, nandu and ostriches, the upper palate has grown with the skull, which makes the upper part of their beak almost motionless. The dinosaurs also had a fused palate, so the researchers for a long time suggested that birds like emu and ostriches evolved the first, and the ability of birds to move the upper part of the beak developed later.

Now, however, the new data indicate that everything, perhaps, was quite the opposite. Based on the analysis of the bones of the skull of a new -nailed prehistoric bird, paleontologists suggested that the articulated upper part of the beak appeared much earlier than before, and the fused sky developed in birds later. Researchers described in detail their conclusions in an article published in Nature magazine.

A new type of ancient toothy birds, identified using computed tomography in a 20-year rock block of fossils from a career located near Lieg, received the name Janavis finalidens (Janavis indicates an Janus, two-faced Roman god all undertakings, door, inputs and exits; avis-“bird”-“bird”-“bird”-“bird”-“bird”-“bird” Latin; finalidens combines Latin words "completion" and "teeth"). This bird lived 66.7 million years ago, at the very end of the dinosaur era, and weighed about 1.5 kg.

Maxim Borisov

Nature ( Nature.com/articles/s41586-022-0545-Y)
Smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/ ! -67-million-year-old-old-turns-the-thery-bird-evolution-upside-Down-18098121219/