Bird from dinosaur age adds to ancestry mystery

MYSTERY surrounding the ancestry of modern birds has deepened after the discovery of a rare fossil dating back to the age of the dinosaurs.

Scientists analysed the almost perfectly intact fossil skeleton of a bird the size of a turkey vulture that lived 75 million years ago.

They discovered that the creature, Mirarce eatoni, must have been an expert flyer, just as well adapted for flight as modern birds.

Yet this bird and other members of its family group, the enantiornithines, all vanished in the mass extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.

Only one group of birds, whose descendants are still living today, survived the cataclysm that followed a massive meteor impact off the coast of Mexico. Why this should be the case has been an on-going mystery.

The advanced traits seen the bird create even more a puzzle.

US researcher Jessie Atterholt, from the University of California at Berkeley, said: “We know that birds in the early Cretaceous, about 115 to 130 million years ago, were capable of flight but probably not as well adapted for it as modern birds.

“What this new fossil shows is that enantiornithines, though totally separate from modern birds, evolved some of the same adaptations for highly refined, advanced flight styles.”

The fossil, housed at the University of California Museum of Palaeontology at Berkeley, was discovered in Utah in 1992 but has only now undergone analysis. in of