Two feather skeletons unearth in former Cretaceous sediment of China belong to to the oldest relatives of today ’s doll ever discover . Archaeornithura meemannaeenjoyed an flowing lifestyle and also waded around in lake . Thefindings , published inNature Communicationsthis week , bear on back the evolutionary record of innovative birds by six million year .
Ornithuromorpha is the name of the evolutionary branch that gave rise to every bird mintage alert today . And back in the Mesozoic Era , between 252 and 66 million days ago , ornithuromorphs represented one-half of all the dame around . Another branch called Enantiornithes , on the other script , leave behind no living descendants : These Mesozoic birds had teeth and clawed wing , but they died out at theCretaceous - Paleogene boundaryalong with pterosaurs , plesiosaurs , and all non - avian dinosaurs .
A team led by Min Wang andZhonghe Zhou from the Chinese Academy of Sciencesexamined the two partial skeletons , complete with feathering , unearthed from the Sichakou basin of Hebei Province in northeasterly China . Based on the geologic layers where these fossils were extracted from , the newly learn coinage live about 130.7 million years ago in the former Cretaceous . That means it predates the previous earliest book holder for this branch : a 125 - million - year - previous specimen from the Lower Cretaceous Yixian Formation .
These fossil have more in common with a forward-looking bird than any found from such an early level in their evolution , Wang says . In add-on to the exceptionally conserve feather , they had other anatomic feature that bespeak manoeuvrability during flight , such as the small acoustic projection on the front boundary of their wings . Their fan - shaped tail feather , highly fused bones at the death of wings , and U - shape wishbone resemble our birds today , Science explains .
moreover , thehummingbird - sizedspecies may have also wad – they had no feathers on their upper leg . The siltstone they were embed in suggests that the area may have once been a lake . amount out of the prophylactic of Tree to take advantage of the unfastened , semi - aquatic space meant they had more high protein food choices , Zhou says , and having more predation atmospheric pressure likely favour the phylogenesis of adept fliers . These fossils , according to the squad , reveal the bloodline of features that belike helped modern birds survive the multitude extinction event tens of meg of years after .
" The new Bronx cheer is quite derived and has many modern features of modern birds , and thus is far away from the transitional history of dinosaurs - birds,“Wang secernate The Washington Post . And while the species represent the earliest ornithuromorph shuttle on record , " the most primitive bird of Ornithuromorpha is most likely from older deposits than what we get word now . "
The Greek “ archae ” and “ ornithura ” mean “ ancient ornithuromorph , ” and the species name honors paleontologist Meemann Chang .
Images : Zongda Zhang ( top ) , Wang et al . , Nature Communications ( bottom )
