It looked like a very small chicken, but it could bite you. It had elongated legs, twice as long as the hips. Something very strange, because for most dinosaurs, everything happened the other way around. He weighed less than a kilogram: about 641 grams. It is believed that its size ranged from 50 to 90 centimeters, like pheasants. they called him Fujianvenator prodigiosus. He lived 150 million years ago and was the same age as the “first bird”.
“I would say it’s strange,” Ming Wang, the head of the study, said of the discovery when asked to describe it. The fossil was discovered last year in what is now Fujian province in southeast China. Fujianvenator prodigiosus means precisely “Fujiang Strange Hunter” In Latin. Classifying it as a bird will depend on how we define a bird, Wang said. “It is far from similar to any modern bird. Reuters.
So Fujianvenator they included it a group called “avials”, which includes all birds and their closest non-avian relatives dinosaurs. His tibia was twice as long as his femur. This is a unique phenomenon among theropods – a group that includes all carnivorous dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaur. He also had a long tail.
The researchers proposed two possible lifestyles for this dinosaur bird. It was one of those that ran fast, or, conversely, an animal that walked slowly over swampy terrain, like modern cranes or herons. “I would put my money on a broker”Wang commented.
Dinosaur Bird Discovery – Good Luck
Scientists cannot know Funjianvenator could fly. Probably not, Wang said, the features of the skeleton are not in his favor in this regard. For example, he had a shortened shoulder blade and special fingers for grasping.
The fossil does not have feathers, but its known relatives did. That’s why, the group presents him as a feathered animal. In the area where this dinosaur bird was found, the researchers also found fossils of fish, turtles and other aquatic reptiles.
The find was made in a swampy area near Nanping, where dinosaurs had never been found before. So the team says it was luck. Except, remains of late Jurassic bird-like dinosaurs are hard to find. Their hollow bones are very fragile, which makes them less well preserved. It needs ideal conditions, such as the absence of oxygen, to petrify. Conditions that lakes or swamps can provide.
Scientists are fascinated. Due to its age, it is one of the first bird-like dinosaurs, so it may be key to understanding their origins better.
On the evolution of dinosaurs and the origin of birds
Many paleontologists believe that the first bird was a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur called Archeopteryx. Their fossils have been found in Germany. It is a crow-sized bird with a long tail and no beak, first discovered in the 19th century.
Dinosaurs largely died out 66 million years ago. This study is new evidence that earlier, at the time Archeopteryx, Dinosaurs have already split into different types of birdsexplained Mark Lowen, a paleontologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City who was not involved in the discovery, published in Nature.
fujianvenator it also helps fill in some of the gaps in the evolutionary history of birds. In the fossil record there is a gap of about 20 million years between them. Archeopteryx and the next bird found.
“There are so many more things to be discovered,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, a paleontologist at Yale University. Nature. “We’ve only scratched the surface of the anatomical diversity and lifestyle of these animals.”
Source: Hiper Textual
