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A new species of bird from around 68 million years ago was discovered on the island of Madagascar and its unusual beak could provide new insights into the evolution of modern birds.
Discovered from a single, near-complete skull that was fossilized after being buried in muddy debris, Falcatakely is a raven-sized bird with a sickle-shaped beak. This is by no means unusual in modern birds and is similar to hornbills and toucans. However, there is a gap of tens of millions of years between these evolving species.
“What is so surprising is that these lineages converge on this same basic anatomy despite being very distantly related,” said Dr Ryan Felice, professor of human anatomy at University College London and one of the study’s authors. In fact, this is the first time such a beak shape has been found on a bird from the Mesozoic era, the era that contains the Cretaceous, Jurassic and Triassic periods.
Looking under Falcatakely’s skin reveals another unusual feature. Although its face may have the appearance of a modern bird, its underlying bone structure is much more like that of a dinosaur. Modern birds have a beak consisting mainly of a large bone, called the premaxilla. Ancient birds, such as the dinosaur Archeopteryx, had two, with a small premaxilla and a large jaw.
More information on the evolution of birds:
Hence, Falcatakely developed a modern face shape without a modern facial structure. “Falcatakely might generally resemble any number of modern birds with the skin and beak in place, however, it is the underlying skeletal structure of the face that transforms what we know about the evolutionary anatomy of the birds on its head,” said the Prof Patrick O’Connor, an anatomist at Ohio University.
The team was unable to study the skull directly. Bird fossils are rare, because their skeletons are so fragile that they are usually destroyed rather than fossilized. The specimen is so fragile that they could not even remove it from the rock. Instead, the team used high-resolution micro-computed tomography to scan the fossil, which they then used to digitally reconstruct it.
“The Falcatekely discovery underlines that much of Earth’s deep history is still shrouded in mystery,” added O’Connor, “particularly from those parts of the planet that have been relatively less explored.
“The more we learn about the Cretaceous-age animals, plants and ecosystems in what is now Madagascar, the more we see that its unique biotic signature extends far back into the past and does not simply reflect the island’s ecosystem in the past. times “.
Reader’s question and answer: Why were birds the only dinosaurs to survive the mass extinction?
Asked by: Edward Seymour, Hove
The asteroid that caused the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous period hit the Earth with 60,000 times the energy of the entire nuclear arsenal of the world. The atmosphere would become red-hot for several hours, and any large dinosaurs that couldn’t dig underground or hide under water were immediately roasted.
When the smaller species came out of hiding, they found a charred landscape and the air so thick with clouds of soot and sulfur dioxide that sunlight was almost completely blocked for the following year. It was too dark for photosynthesis, so the herbivores died, then the carnivores.
The birds are descended from the maniraptor dinosaurs, but they had two major adaptations that helped them survive. First, they had beaks instead of teeth, which allowed them to break open seeds and nuts buried in the soil.
Second, their relatively large cranial capacity suggests they were smarter than other reptiles. They may have lived in more complex social groups that could cooperate and adapt to find new food sources in the radically different post-apocalyptic landscape. This allowed them to eventually outgrow any other small dinosaur species that might have survived the initial impact.
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