Two fossils with unscathed plumage dating back to 130 million years have been described by scientists in China as a new species of early bird.
Scientists believe that this is possibly the earliest known member of the clade which produced the contemporary birds Ornithuromorpha. This drives back the branch-out of this evolutionary group by a minimum of 5 million years. The discovery of this bird which seemed capable of spritely flight has been reported in the journal Nature Communications.
The evolution of birds began from dinosaurs about 150 million years back at the extreme end of the Jurassic period. That had been the age of the renowned yet ardently challenged ‘first bird’ Archaeopteryx, which is now reflected by a lot of people as the ‘feathered dinosaur’.
About 20 million years after than era, when the newfound species had been paddling and fluttering through what would one day be called the north-eastern China, and according to paleontologists there had been a reasonable assortment of bird life and about half of those had been species of Enantiornithies, a group of early birds which had teeth and clawed wings and eventually went extinct. The other half consisted of the new find, Ornithuromorpha, a group which in due course provided the rise of modern birds and even looked much similar aesthetically.
What really forked the diversity had been the branching out event and that pushes back the discovery back in time as the earliest known Ornithuromorph was 125 million years old formerly. The pair of new skeletons which define the new species had been named Archaeornithura meemannae and had been excavated from the Sichakou basin in Hebei Province.
The leading author Wang Ming from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing said, “The new fossil represents the oldest record of Ornithuropmorpha. It pushes back the origination date… by at least five million years.”
All the specimens have been preserved immaculately which revealed a number of details about Archaeornithura meemannae. The bird had been of 15 cm in heights and its legs had no feathers, even on the upper part which made scientists believe they had a wading lifestyle. The size and shape of the bones also gave clues on their good maneuverability on air.