Name: Dinosaur-era bird with scythe-like beak sheds light on avian diversity
Brand: reuters.com
SKU: reuters-com-2453
Availability: OnlineOnly

critic

Dinosaur-era bird with scythe-like beak sheds light on avian diversity

preview

By WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A delicate but exquisitely preserved skull of a crow-sized bird with a scythe-like beak that inhabited Madagascar 68 million years ago is showing scientists that they have a lot of learn about avian diversity during the age of dinosaurs.Slideshow Scientists on Wednesday said the bird, called Falcatakely forsterae, possessed a face unlike any other known bird from the age of dinosaurs - the Mesozoic Era - not only because of the beak shape but because of its underlying anatomy.Its beak looked superficially like that of a small toucan though the two species are not closely related. While modern birds exhibit a great variety of beak shapes - from the sword-billed hummingbird to the rhinoceros hornbill - little such diversity had been discovered among Mesozoic birds.Falcatakely’s 3.5-inch (9-cm) skull remains partially embedded in rock because the scientists did not want to risk harming it. Instead they analyzed it using sophisticated scanning and digital reconstruction. Only its skull was found.“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.Reporting by Will Dunham; editing by Jonathan OatisOur Standards:

By WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A delicate but exquisitely preserved skull of a crow-sized bird with a scythe-like beak that inhabited Madagascar 68 million years ago is showing scientists that they have a lot of learn about avian diversity during the age of dinosaurs.Slideshow Scientists on Wednesday said the bird, called Falcatakely forsterae, possessed a face unlike any other known bird from the age of dinosaurs - the Mesozoic Era - not only because of the beak shape but because of its underlying anatomy.Its beak looked superficially like that of a small toucan though the two species are not...

public

Will Dunham

Top and breaking news, pictures and videos from Reuters. For more breaking business news, follow @ReutersBiz.

reuters.com

Credible

Speculation

Anecdotal Evidence

Generalization

Stacking the Deck

Appeal to Authority

Straw Man

Slippery Slope

Emotional Appeal

Red Herring

False Dilemma

Illogical

Moral Equivalency

Ad Hominem

Correlation w/o Causation

Semantics

Begging the Question

Faulty Analogy

Non Sequitur

Bandwagon

Dogmatism

Failing Occam's Razor

Biased

Pure Opinion

Hit Piece

Racial Bias

National Bias

Religious Bias

Financial Incentive

Political Agenda

Gender Bias

Misused Image/Video

Study Misinterpreted

Mistake

Misused Term

Science Misrepresented

Factual Error

Satire

Surface Level

Lack of Reliable Sources

Sensational

Not Credible

Investigative

Balanced

Well Sourced

Great Context

sports

entertainment

U.S.

international

business

technology

science

culture

politics

media

health

Dinosaur-era bird with scythe-like beak sheds light on avian diversity

No article scores yet.

CRITIC REVIEWS

PUBLIC REVIEWS