New studies show early birds resemble modern bird skulls, which creates the problem of avian evolution.
Early Bird Skulls Resemble Modern Ones
The first birds on Earth may be more contemporary than scientists anticipated; based on a discovery that raises interesting questions about such a nebulous period in evolutionary development, reported Live Science.
The first birds deviated from two-legged theropod dinosaurs about 165 million to 150 million years ago, during the Jurassic period, as shown in a 2015 paper in the journal Current Biology.
They lived side by side with dinosaurs in the Cretaceous. Just after the extinction event, which decimated the nonavian dinosaurs roughly 66 million years ago, avian took off in evolutionary terms.
Though a more detailed knowledge of this procedure is mysterious, there are hardly any bird skeletons from the Cretaceous. It was a pivotal point of bird origins since the dino-killing asteroid not only wiped out many oldest lineages of birds, leaving only the surviving members to give birth to modern birds.
According to Daniel Field, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Cambridge in the U.K., told Live Science. It's an essential part of evolution that ascertains the best samples.
The finding is Janavis's a vulture-size, toothed bird that's not explicitly linked to any modern animals and was a direct ancestor of modern bird ancestors in the dying days of the dinos.
This newly characterized species amazed Field and his team due to a major quirk of its skull. The bird's palate is unfused, giving the animal a mobile upper beak, much like a modern duck or a Modern bird skull in early avian evolution.
It was remarkable, even though scientists would have assumed the most primitive birds must have melded palates and rigid upper beaks, much like today's emus and ostriches.
The scientific revelation, authored on Nov. 30 in the journal Nature proposes an alternative theory that states the earliest birds started to look "contemporary" and the "primitive" beak of emus and ostriches might have developed afterward.
Bone of Contention Through Avian evolution
A mobile palate lends credence to a mobile beak, so researchers presumed that unfused "modern jawed" birds were an evolved progress over their more primitive "antiquated jawed" forebears. With such a mobile beak, birds are superior at preening, eating, roosting, building, and other tasks requiring finesse.
Regrettably, the sad story of evolutionary advancement seems not to hang tight. In the 1990s, paleontologists found a softball-size hunk of rock containing petrified Cretaceous bird bone fragments in such a rock in Belgium.
For decades, people were still trying to understand the sample. However, using computed tomography (CT) analysis to take a gander inside the fossil noninvasively, Field and his team soon realized that the fossil enclosed something thrilling: cranium bones. A previously identified bird shoulder bone seemed to be part of the palate.
Field added they would continue taking a very close look at the anatomy of Janavis to shed a little bit lighter on what its biology was truly like.
They will take a comprehensive look at the morphology of Janavis in trying to shed just a little bit of light. Finding a modern bird skull on the ancient Janavis is a start in early avian evolution.
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