Bird with scythe-shaped beak that lived 68 million years ago sheds light on avian diversity – it’s viral

A delicate but superbly preserved skull of a crow-sized bird with a scythe-shaped beak that inhabited Madagascar 68 million years ago shows scientists that they have learned a lot about bird diversity in the world. age of the dinosaurs.

Scientists said on Wednesday that the bird, called Falcatakely forsterae, possessed a different face than any other bird known to the age of dinosaurs – the Mesozoic era – not only because of the shape of its beak, but because of its its underlying anatomy.

Its beak superficially resembled that of a small toucan although the two species are not closely related. While modern birds exhibit a wide variety of bill shapes – from sword-billed hummingbirds to rhinoceros hornbills – such diversity had been little discovered among Mesozoic birds.

Falcatakely’s 9cm (3.5in) skull remains partially embedded in the rock because scientists didn’t want to risk harming it. Instead, they analyzed it using sophisticated scanning and digital reconstruction. Only his skull was found.

“Incredible, small, delicate, fragile, difficult to study – all at the same time,” said Patrick O’Connor, professor of anatomy at Ohio University, senior author of the research published in the journal Nature.

“Bird fossils are particularly rare in part because they have such delicate skeletons. Hollow bones are not perfect for surviving the fossilization process, ”added paleontologist and study co-author Alan Turner of Stony Brook University in New York.

“For this reason, we must be aware that we are probably downsampling the Mesozoic diversity of birds. A newly discovered species like Falcatakely gives a taste of the enticing possibility of a greater diversity of forms waiting to be discovered, ”said Turner.

Birds evolved from small feathered dinosaurs around 150 million years ago. Early risers have retained many ancestral characteristics, 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 his life.

It belonged to an avian group, the enantiornithins, which did not survive the mass extinction 66 million years ago, ending the Cretaceous period.

“Unlike early birds such as Archeopteryx, which in many ways still looked dinosaurian with their long tails and unspecialized snouts, enantiornithins like Falcatakely would have looked relatively modern,” Turner said.

It was in the underlying skeletal structure that its differences were most apparent, O’Connor added, with more similarities to dinosaurs like Velociraptor than modern birds.