New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
Paleontologists find unknown fossil in Bruce Museum archives
GREENWICH — After decades of sitting in anonymity in the collection of the Bruce Museum, the fossil of a little bird distantly related to the modern-day grouses and turkeys has been officially identified and named in honor of one of the museum’s patrons.
Centuriavis lioae was introduced to the scientific community this week in the Journal of Paleontology. The paleontologists who gave the bird its official moniker, Bruce Museum Curator Daniel Ksepka and Curatorial Associate Kate Dzikiewicz, named it in honor of Suzanne Lio, who is the managing director and chief operating officer at the Bruce Museum.
“I’m so thankful to have even been considered for this honor,” Lio said in a statement. “I’m truly blessed to work for the Bruce Museum where I’m surrounded by such an incredible, dedicated team of employees. This is really a celebration for all of us at the Bruce.”
The fossil was actually discovered in 1933 in Nebraska and was housed at the Bruce for decades, officials said. No scientist had undertaken a study of the fossil remains of the bird, which roamed the plains some 11 millions years ago — until Ksepka and Dzikiewicz gave it a thorough examination, using hi-tech scanning technology to reconstruct the shape of the brain and analyze skeletal features.
The name Centuriavis means “century bird,” referencing the fact that the fossil was collected nearly a century ago, officials said.
Lioae is the Latin version of Suzanne Lio’s surname.
Ksepka, an expert on early bird life on earth, said it was not uncommon to find new spaces in the collections of museums around the world. A student at Yale has been going through the collection there and uncovering a number of new discoveries among the fossils and old bones, he pointed out.
“It may come as a surprise that such a beautiful and nearly complete fossil could go unstudied for almost 100 years” said Ksepka. “This isn’t a unique case — there are relatively few paleontologists in the world, and only a small percentage of those study birds. Many other important fossils are surely sitting in cabinets waiting to be studied or even still inside their plaster jackets, waiting to be freed from the rock.”
Added Dzikiewicz, “One of the rewarding things about paleontology is that when you identify a new species, you have the opportunity to coin a name that describes some key feature of the animal, honors a person, or ties the fossil to a place. In this case, we were thrilled to honor Suzanne Lio for her tireless efforts to advance the Bruce Museum’s mission, especially in the natural sciences.”
Ksepka is no stranger to naming a scientific discovery: He named the earliest species of bird ever discovered after the bird’s skull, 66.7 million years old, was unearthed in Belgium by a team of University of Cambridge researchers he was working with. The fossil and the bird it came from was jokingly named the “Wonderchicken” before Ksepka bestowed a more formal scientific name on it, Asteriornis maastrichtensis.
Asteria was a Greek goddess who turned herself into a quail and fell into the Aegean Sea to escape from the lustful advances of the Greek god Zeus. The bird fossil was found near the city of Maastrich.