China Jurassic fossil rewrites history of bird evolution

Beijing/Fuzhou: A short-tailed bird fossil, stated to be the oldest dating back about 150 million years, was discovered by Chinese scientists in east China’s Fujian Province shedding a new light on the origin of the birds, official media here reported on Thursday.

The fossilised bird Baminornis zhenghensis was discovered in Zhenghe County, Fujian Province.

Its short tail ends in a compound bone called the pygostyle, a feature uniquely present in modern birds. This indicates that the body structure of modern birds emerged in the Late Jurassic Period, 20 million years earlier than previously known, state-run Xinhua news reported. This suggests that birds might have originated earlier than previously thought, according to the report.

The bird displays a unique combination of traits, including modern bird-like shoulder and pelvic girdles, as well as a non-avian dinosaurs-like hand, which is a very interesting and contradictory phenomenon, Wang Min, a researcher with the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and the leading scientist of the research team said.

“This is a groundbreaking discovery. It overturns the previous situation that Archaeopteryx was the only bird found in the Jurassic Period,” claimed Zhou Zhonghe, an

academician of CAS.