Dr Pascal Godefroit, a paleontologist with the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, and his colleagues have discovered the fossilized remains of a feathered plant-eating dinosaur that lived in the lake-dotted lowlands of Jurassic Siberia, between 169 and 144 million years ago. Previously only carnivorous dinosaurs were known to have had feathers so […]
Tag: paleontology
Changyuraptor yangi: New Feathered Dinosaur Discovered in China
A team of paleontologists from China, the United States and South Africa has described a new species of a feathered dinosaur that lived in what is now northeastern China during the Cretaceous period, about 125 million years ago. The new dinosaur, named Changyuraptor yangi, belongs to Microraptoria – a specific group of predatory four-winged raptorial […]
Pelagornis sandersi: Paleontologist Discovers Largest-Ever Flying Bird
Pelagornis sandersi – a newly discovered extinct species of bird that lived in what is now North America about 28 million years ago – is the largest flying bird ever found, says Dr Daniel Ksepka, a paleontologist with Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. “Pelagornis sandersi could have traveled for extreme distances while crossing ocean waters […]
Oldest Known Fossil of Nectarivorous Bird Discovered
Fossilized pollen grains found in the stomach of a 47-miilion-year-old Pumiliornis tessellatus, a tiny bird that lived in what is now Germany during Eocene, are earliest direct evidence of flower-visiting by birds. Fossil evidence for the existence of pollinating insects dates back to the Cretaceous period. Until now, however, there had been no information at […]
Early Birds Lacked in Diversity, New Study Finds
Researchers from the University of Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History have found a striking lack of diversity in the earliest known fossil bird fauna – the Jehol aviafauna. “There were no swans, no swallows, no herons, nothing like that,” explained Jonathan Mitchell, a PhD student at the University of Chicago and the […]
Hoatzin may have originated in Europe
A new species of prehistoric hoatzin from the late Eocene of France is the earliest fossil record of hoatzins and the first one from Europe, according to a team of scientists from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany. Hoatzins (Opisthocomus hoazin), also known as Hoactzins, Stinkbirds, or Canje Pheasants, are […]