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Every day, scientists find out amazing new information that reshapes our understanding of the ancient world.
The latest groundbreaking discovery concerns a late Cretaceous bird with a very large beak, large enough to chart a new course in the history of evolution.
In a study published Wednesday in Nature, the researchers describe a previously unknown species, Falcatakely forsterae, an ancient bird with an unusually large beak similar to that of a modern toucan.
Big bird – Researchers first discovered the fossil of this unknown bird species a decade ago in Madagascar.
But the fossil specimen was fragile and contained many small bones, so it wasn’t fully analyzed until 2017. But once the tiny fragments were analyzed, the researchers realized they had discovered something truly special.
“As soon as we started carefully removing the rock from those delicate bones, it quickly became apparent that it’s like, ‘Oh, okay, we’ve got something really clean here,'” Patrick O’Connor, lead author of the study and professor of anatomical sciences from Ohio University, he says Reverse.
After removing the rock, the scientists used computed tomography scanners to collect data to simulate the creature’s skull in 3D. They then used 3D printing to build a replica of the bird’s skull.
“There’s a lot of digital modeling that just goes to understand, you know, what the anatomy is in this new animal,” O’Connor says.
The researchers named the species Falcatakely (which more or less means “flying sickle”) for its uniquely shaped face. They classified Falcatakely like an enantiornithine bird, a “group of birds that were alive during the time of the dinosaurs,” says O’Connor. These birds often had teeth and claws on their wings. All known species are now extinct.
Yet, Falcatakely it is different from most other ancient birds that even lived 65-250 million years ago. Although the birds of this era, known as the Cretaceous period, had different body shapes, when it came to their faces, they tend to look more or less the same.
Face Time – But with its long and deep beak, Falcatakely broke the mold.
“Let’s see Falcatakely it has a noticeably divergent face shape from anything else it’s related to, “O’Connor says.
The large beak of this bird more closely resembles that of modern birds.
This is a curious discovery. Modern birds are much more different than ancient ones when it comes to their faces. Anatomy can help explain the difference between most ancient birds, aside from i Falcatakely – and modern ones. It all comes down to one bone in their skull: the premaxillary bone. Located on top of a bird’s beak, ancient birds appear not to have used this bone for feeding, whereas modern birds do.
“All this diversity in modern bird face shape is actually brought about by a bone called the premaxillary bone,” O’Connor says. “And this is the bone that does all this crazy differentiation through development to give you that vast range of face shapes we see around us today.”
Driven by Falcatakely’s unique face shape, the researchers wanted to understand “what’s driving the face shape, not just in modern birds and enantiornithine birds,” according to O’Connor.
They compared the newly discovered bird’s bone structure with other creatures, including non-avian ones, such as dinosaurs.
“Let’s take a broader perspective to say, okay, we can look at a full range of animals that are relatively closely related to each other. Some of them are modern birds, some of them are Mesozoic birds and then those non-avian dinosaurs that are the closest relatives. strains of avian radiation, “O’Connor says.
They discovered the file Falcatakely it may have had a similar appearance to modern birds as a result of convergent evolution, which occurs when unrelated animals evolve in similar ways and share the same traits. But unlike modern birds, the Falcatakely gets its broad beak by expanding the maxillary bone, another skull bone.
“The point of convergence is that it has that general overall shape, but it doesn’t do that by modifying the same facial bones we see in modern birds,” O’Connor says. Rather, this bird’s beak is closer to the structure of one of the fiercest dinosaurs – velociraptors.
“He’s using what we’ve described as a kind of primitive arrangement of the bone structure that’s more like things like velociraptor or microraptor.”
A new path – The findings set a new path in fossil documentation and overturn scientists’ beliefs about what ancient birds might have looked like.
“We would never have predicted that something like this would have, you know, a big, big bill, and that it would be jaw-based, because we’ve never seen it in the fossil record before,” O’Connor says.
More importantly, the study reshapes our understanding of ancient birds and how they evolved.
“Live birds in the Mesozoic were much more diverse than we have ever known,” O’Connor says.
Abstract: Mesozoic birds show considerable diversity in terms of size, flight adaptations and feather organization1–4, but show relatively preserved patterns of beak shape and development5–7. Although neornithine birds (i.e. the crown group) also exhibit constraints on facial development8,9, they have relatively different beak morphologies associated with a range of food and behavioral ecologies, in contrast to Mesozoic birds. Here we describe a bird with a crow-sized stem, Falcatakely forsterae gen. et sp. nov., from the Late Cretaceous period of Madagascar that possesses a long and deep rostrum, an expression of the morphology of the beak that was previously unknown among Mesozoic birds and is superficially similar to that of a variety of birds of the crown group (for example, toucans). The Falcatakely rostrum is composed of a large edentulous maxilla and a small premaxilla bearing a tooth. Morphometric analyzes of the individual bone elements and the three-dimensional shape of the rostrum reveal the development of a neornithin-like facial anatomy despite the retention of a maxillary-premaxillary organization similar to that of nonavialan theropods. The pattern and increased height of the rostrum in Falcatakely reveals a degree of developmental lability and greater morphological disparity that was previously unknown in early avialan ramifications. Expression of this phenotype (and purported ecology) in a stem bird underscores that neornithin-like premaxilla-dominated rostrum consolidation was not an evolutionary prerequisite for beak enlargement.
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