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1 hundred and fifty million years back, a young, bantam-sized, hen-like dinosaur turned mired in a swamp in what is now southeastern China, and succumbed. Its fossilized remains, unearthed in 2022 and named Fujianvenator prodigiosus, demonstrate it to be one of the earliest hen-like dinosaurs to date from the Jurassic interval. The researchers explain their discovery in a paper released nowadays in Nature.
“This is seriously a bizarre animal inside the group of birds,” claims Mark Loewen, a palaeontologist at the College of Utah in Salt Lake Town, who was not associated in the discovery.
The creature experienced oddly lanky legs and could possibly have lacked the potential to fly. It also would not look to conform to the accepted hen-evolution story.
While dinosaurs were being mainly extinct by 66 million a long time back, therapods, the three-clawed, hollow-boned group that included Velociraptor and Tyrannosaurus rex, experienced started to evolve into today’s birds. Several palaeontologists consider the initially fowl to be a 150-million-calendar year-old feathered dinosaur called Archaeopteryx, fossils of which ended up uncovered in Germany. But this review adds to mounting proof that by the time of Archaeopteryx, dinosaurs had now diversified into distinct sorts of birds, Loewen suggests.
Hailu You, a palaeontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and 1 of the co-authors of the paper, states that in the Jurassic, hen-like dinosaurs may have been occupying various ecological niches. “Early hen evolution is sophisticated,” he suggests.
Fujianvenator’s fossil lacks a head or a finish tail, but its system and limbs present a medley of characteristics identical to these of other chook-like dinosaurs, this sort of as the relative lengths of the fingers, and facts of the pelvis and vertebrae.
But it didn’t have many modifications that would add to flight. For instance, it experienced a shortened shoulder blade and fingers more specialised for grabbing. Strangest of all are the bird’s hyper-elongated hind legs, in which the reduced leg bone — the tibia — is two times as prolonged as the thigh bone. This kind of lengthy legs reveal a remarkably competent runner, perhaps very similar to a roadrunner (Geococcyx spp.), states Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, a palaeontologist at Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut.
Alternatively, these stilts could have been utilized for wading. In the location where Fujianvenator was observed, the researchers also uncovered a wide variety of swamp creatures, which they call the Zhenghe fauna. These fossils included fish, turtles and other aquatic reptiles. Swamps had been a formerly unidentified habitat for early birds. To know irrespective of whether the bird’s legginess was an adaptation to swamp lifetime or large-pace operating, researchers would need to look at the ends of its toes for indications of webbing — but all those digits are poorly preserved. Both situation is equally doable, the authors create.
The reality that the dinosaur was uncovered at all was a stroke of luck. Scientists uncovered the fossil at a web-site in close proximity to Nanping in Fujian province, exactly where no dinosaurs have been uncovered in advance of. And illustrations of late-Jurassic hen-like dinosaurs are rare mainly because their hollow bones are fragile and maintain much less perfectly. Fossilization involves excellent disorders these kinds of an absence of oxygen to avoid decay — circumstances that lakes or swamps can deliver.
Because of that shortage of fossils, Fujianvenator helps to fill in some gaps in early fowl evolution, claims Bhullar. “Even at their earliest levels, the closest fossil relations of birds had been diversifying in interesting means.”
“There are many, many these items left to be found,” he claims. “We’ve only scratched the area of the anatomical and life style variety of these animals.”
This posting is reproduced with authorization and was very first posted on September 6, 2023.
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