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“Amazing, small, delicate, fragile, challenging to study – all at the same time,” said Ohio University anatomy professor Patrick O’Connor, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.
“Bird fossils are particularly rare in part because they have such delicate skeletons. Hollow bones aren’t great at surviving the fossilization process,” added paleontologist and study co-author Alan Turner of Stony Brook University in New York.
“Because of this, we need to be aware that we are probably under-sampling the Mesozoic diversity of birds. A newly discovered species like Falcatakely provides a taste of the tantalizing possibility of a greater diversity of form waiting to be discovered,” Turner said.
Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs about 150 million years ago. Early birds retained many ancestral features including teeth. The Falcatakely fossil has a single conical tooth in the front part of the upper jaw. Falcatakely probably had a small number of teeth in life.
It belonged to an avian group, enantiornithines, that did not survive the mass extinction event 66 million years ago, ending the Cretaceous Period.
“Unlike the earliest birds such as Archaeopteryx, which in many ways still looked dinosaurian with their long tails and unspecialized snouts, enantiornithines like Falcatakely would have looked relatively modern,” Turner said.
It was in the underlying skeletal structure where its differences were more apparent, O’Connor added, with more similarities to dinosaurs like Velociraptor than modern birds.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiY2h0dHBzOi8vY2Fub2UuY29tL25ld3Mvd29ybGQvZGlub3NhdXItZXJhLWJpcmQtd2l0aC1zY3l0aGUtbGlrZS1iZWFrLXNoZWRzLWxpZ2h0LW9uLWF2aWFuLWRpdmVyc2l0edIBkQFodHRwczovL2Nhbm9lLmNvbS9uZXdzL3dvcmxkL2Rpbm9zYXVyLWVyYS1iaXJkLXdpdGgtc2N5dGhlLWxpa2UtYmVhay1zaGVkcy1saWdodC1vbi1hdmlhbi1kaXZlcnNpdHkvd2NtL2MyMGI4NDIwLTNkNDUtNDFlOC05ODM1LWJkMzU3MTFkZGU2ZC9hbXAv?oc=5
2020-11-25 22:07:16Z
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