Fossils from 44m years ago give missing link to ancient chickens
TINY bird fossils dating back 44 million years have provided the missing link to ancient relatives of the chicken.
Scientists said the quail-like fossil fills a near-15-million-year gap in records, offering links to early extinct relatives of chickens and turkeys.
The discovery, unearthed in Utah, consists of a distinct tiny shoulder bone from the extinct quail-like bird said to be similar in size to today’s quails and hill partridges.
Research suggests it could be the oldest fossil of an extinct group called Paraortygidae, related to the chicken, turkey, quail and guineafowl family.
The ancient remains came from 44m-year-old rocks in eastern Utah and shows strong links with other extinct species from Namibia, Southern Africa and Uzbekistan.
While the fossil is unique, researchers are waiting to find more bones of the skeleton before giving it a formal scientific name.
Dr Thomas Stidham, from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: “I didn’t think much of the little fossil at first. It wasn’t until I saw a recent paper by a Russian colleague describing a very similar fossil from Uzbekistan that
I realised we were looking at the same group of birds on different continents.
“Even tiny incomplete fossils can provide the data to link global scientific questions together.”
The newly discovered species likely lived before the evolution of the large crop and gizzard that we see in living chickens and turkeys, and likely had a different diet to its living relatives.
It is thought their population was widely spread and had a flexible ecology and diet, with the earliest fossils of its group coming from barren habitats, inland forests and the seashore.
Dr Beth Townsend, from Midwestern University in Arizona, said: “The paraortygid fossils from Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America show the group was very widely dispersed early in their evolution and crossed oceans in order to be so widely spread.”
Researchers said the find is incredibly rare, especially for a fossil of its small size.
Dr Patricia Holroyd, from the University of California Museum of Paleontology in Berkeley, said: “They are incredibly rare, especially ones this small. I didn’t think there was anything like it found there before.”