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A former graduate student at Berkeley University on Tuesday released a study of her research on a 75 million-year-old bird skeleton of the extinct enantiornith species.
Jessie Atterholt, lead author of the study, began researching fossils as a graduate student. In 1992, Howard Hutchison, a retired paleontologist, discovered the fossils while doing fieldwork in southern Utah. The area where the fossil was found is a series of deeply eroded, steep and rugged badlands called "The Blues" in the northern part of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.
"To find fossils, paleontologists must climb and walk carefully while visually inspecting the ground for any sign of bone. That's how Dr. Hutchison discovered the skeleton, "said Patricia Holroyd, a senior scientist at the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California.
It is the most complete enantiornith fossil discovered in North America.
Atterholt said that over the years, many paleontologists specializing in bird fossils have been trying to study the skeleton with Hutchison. She added that research on the enantiomithel skeleton is unfinished due to the number of other projects that paleontologists have chosen to undertake.
"We have been able to understand the trends in the evolution of this particular group of birds to which this fossil belongs," Atterholt said. "When they were alive, they really succeeded. We find their fossils on every continent except Antarctica. "
Atterholt described an enantiornith – which went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous – as a "cousin" of modern birds. They had feathers like modern birds but differed in that they were not as well adapted to flying, that they still had teeth and that they knew different patterns of development, Atterholt added.
Jingmai O'Connor, an expert on enantiomiths working with Atterholt, is responsible for cladistic analysis – based on the relationship between different organisms and a common ancestor – of this particular species.
"This fossil shows us an adaptation to hitherto unknown flight in enantiornithines and shows that they have developed a flight-specific specialization, feathers, along with some dromaeosaurid dinosaurs and the lineage of birds," said O 'Connor in an email.
According to the research paper published by Atterholt, prickly pimples – found on modern birds – anchor wing feathers on the skeleton to reinforce them for active flight. This is the first discovery of prickly pimples in an enantiornithine bird.
Atterholt is currently examining thin sections of the fossil bone to determine the growth patterns of enantiornithine. She also studies paws and legs to understand how these birds lived and the conditions in which they lived.
"There is even more information in the fossil beyond all that," Atterholt said. "Berkeley has a paleontology museum at the University of California, so the fossil remains there. It will be there for anybody – researcher or anyone – who wants to come see him. "
Contact Stanley von Ehrenstein-Smith [email protected] and follow him on Twitter to @von_ehrenstein.
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