World's first bird? New fossil bumps Archaeopteryx off its perch.
A new contender for the world's first bird, the feathered Aurornis xui is older than the more famous Archaeopteryx, which it reconfirms as a bird, not a dinosaur. But the line between birds and dinosaurs remains fuzzy.
The skeleton of an Aurornis xui was found in Yizhou Fossil & Geology Park, China. A contender for the title of 'world's first bird,' this bird - slash - bird-like dinosaur lived in Asia in the Middle/Late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago.
Courtesy of Masato Hattori / LiveScience.com
The skeleton of a Jurassic dinosaur from China could also be the oldest known bird, scientists report.
The fossil of听Aurornis xui听was found last year in a museum at the Fossil and Geology Park in Yizhou, China, long after a farmer first dug it up in the Liaoning Province. The feathery specimen represents the most ancient of the avialans, the group that includes birds and their relatives since their split from nonavian dinosaurs.
The research also reconfirms the birdlike fossil听听as an avialan, a classification that was challenged by some recent research.听
Not everyone agrees that the new specimen is strictly a bird. "In my opinion, it's a bird," study author Pascal Godefroit, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, told听. Even so, he added, "The differences between birds and [nonavian] dinosaurs are very thin."
"Traditionally, we have defined birds as things like Archaeopteryx and closer to things like modern birds," vertebrate paleontologist Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience. "If you stick to the definition, this thing is not earliest known bird," Chiappe said, but that's missing the point, he said. What matters, is that it's a very interesting animal that "still helps us understand better the origin of birds," he said.
Aurornis xui听was a feathered dinosaur that lived during the Middle Jurassic period about 150 million years ago, analysis shows. It was about 1.6 feet (0.5 meter) from beak tip to tail tip, and possessed small, sharp teeth and long forelimbs.
The creature probably couldn't fly, Godefroit said, but may have used its wings to glide between trees. The fossil's feathers aren't well-preserved, but the hip bones and other features strongly suggest it was a relative of modern birds, he said.
The researchers assert that听Aurornis听诲颈蝉辫濒补肠别蝉听Archaeopteryx听as the听, placing听Archaeopteryx听further along in the avialan lineage. Since听Archaeopteryx听was a flying creature, its placement among avialans means dinosaurs would have only had to听听once during evolutionary history.
The new findings also classify another family of birdlike dinosaurs, known as Troodontidae, as a sister group to the avialans. This reshuffling of the bird-dinosaur family tree suggests birds and nonavian dinosaurs diverged in Asia during the Middle to Late Jurassic.
The findings are detailed in the May 30 issue of the journal Nature.
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