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“These characteristics give the skull of Falcatakely an almost comical profile – imagine a creature resembling a tiny deer-toothed toucan flitting from branch to branch, occasionally glancing at the formidable late Cretaceous inhabitants of Madagascar, “he writes,” which included mammals equally bizarre and giant predatory dinosaurs “.
“Unlike early birds such as Archeopteryx, which in many ways still looked like a dinosaur with their long tails and unskilled snouts, enantiornithines like Falcatakely it would have looked relatively modern, ”Turner said.
In fact, he had nearly remained, sitting in a heap of excavated fossils for years before the CT scan suggested the specimen deserved more attention.
Patrick O’Connor, the study’s lead author and a professor of Anatomical Sciences at the University of Ohio, told Inverse that as soon as they started carefully removing the rock from those delicate bones they realized they had something really clean. “Mesozoic birds with such tall and long faces are completely unknown, with Falcatakely providing a great opportunity to reconsider ideas about the evolution of the head and beak in the lineage leading to modern birds. “
Falcatakely – described in the journal Nature – was excavated in what is now northwestern Madagascar.
While Falcatakely it would have had a face familiar enough to us from modern birds like toucans and hornbills, the bones that made up its face bear little resemblance to those modern creatures.
It was in the underlying skeletal structure where its differences were most evident, O’Connor added, with more similarities to dinosaurs like the Velociraptor than to modern birds.
“For this reason, we need to be aware that we are probably downsampling the Mesozoic diversity of birds.”
Revealing these characteristics was not an easy task. This fossil bird discovery adds a new twist to the evolution of skulls and beaks in birds and their close relatives, demonstrating that evolution can work through different developmental pathways to achieve similar head shapes in very distant animals.
When the researchers finally turned their attention to it seven years later, they faced a problem: the skull and beak were too fragile to be pulled out for examination.
Due to the fragility of the fossil and the fact that it cannot be completely removed from its rock box, the researchers “digitally extracted” the fragile bones using scans.
Then they rebuilt the skull with 3D printing and compared it to other species.
What they found was an almost poignant animal, according to Daniel Field, of the University of Cambridge’s Department of Earth Sciences, who examined the study for Nature.
It’s not just the unexpected bill, but the fact that the beak in the fossil has the tip of a single preserved tooth, perhaps one of many the bird would have had.
“These characteristics give the skull of Falcatakely an almost comical profile: imagine a creature that looks like a tiny toucan with dandelions, ”Field wrote.
Falcatakely it belongs to an extinct group of birds called Enantiornithes, exclusively from the Cretaceous period and mainly present in Asia.
“There is a span of more than 50 million years where we know almost nothing about the history of the evolution of birds,” he said.
Bird skeletons, especially skulls, are rare in the fossil record due to their light bones and small size. A global team of researchers led by Professor Patrick O’Connor of the University of Ohio and Professor Alan H. Turner of Stony Brook University announced the discovery today in the journal Nature.
However, the researchers say Falcatakely it is extraordinary and different from most of his contemporaries who even lived 65-250 million years ago.
“Was it about food processing?”
Prof O’Connor said: ‘Falcatakely it could generally resemble any number of modern birds with the skin and beak in place.
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