There were flying dinosaurs before and after Archaeopteryx, but their flight surfaces were made from skin, not feathers. Half-way houseĪlthough the fossils are a rare and intriguing find, they leave archaeologists yearning for the elusive half-way house between reptiles and birds. The oxygen-poor waters would have slowed their decay, allowing their feathers and bones to leave intricate impressions in the fine silt. The birds either lived in the area or were passing through when they fell in, speculates Milner. Over a million years ago, the area boasted a series of stagnant lagoons lined with thick silt. The recognized finds all hail from a 25-square-kilometre patch of quarry in Bavaria, Germany, known as the Solnhofen Limestone. It is rumoured that others have been found, but with rare fossils fetching a high price on the black market, no official details have emerged. So far, just seven magpie-sized Archaeopteryx specimens have been described. “Archaeopteryx became an icon for evolution in action.”Īngela Milner Palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum, London The birds had a keen sense of vision and the movement and balance control needed for coordinated, controlled flight. "This shows that Archaeopteryx was more bird-like than we thought," says Larry Witmer, who studies the evolution of flight at Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine. Such attributes are not found in animals that do not take to the skies. Its inner ear structure, which helped to control balance, was also bird-like and its brain to body size-ratio resembled that of today's feathered fliers. The team believe that Archaeopteryx had enlarged brain regions for vision and movement control, similar to modern-day birds. Their results are reported in this week's Nature 1. From this, they were able to infer what the brain was like. They took over 1,000 X-ray images in various orientations and used them to create a three-dimensional reconstruction of the skull's interior. The researchers used computed tomography (CT) to peer inside the conker-sized brain-case of the first Archaeopteryx specimen ever to be found. Now Milner's team has shown that the animal could fly and was a true, albeit early, bird. ![]() ![]() "It became an icon for evolution in action," says Angela Milner, from London's Natural History Museum, who studies the creature.īut some researchers have disputed whether Archaeopteryx ever took to the skies, citing, for example, its lack of a bird-like breastbone as evidence that it lacked the power to take off. The enigma combines the feathered wings and wishbone of birds with the teeth and long, bony tail characteristic of reptiles, causing many to view it as an intermediate between the two groups. Researchers have confirmed that Archaeopteryx had a brain and body geared for flight, earning it the moniker of the world's most primitive bird.Įver since the first fossilized remains were found in 1861, Archaeopteryx has courted controversy. It was half-bird, half-reptile and it soared above the still lagoons of Bavaria 147 million years ago. Archaeopteryx: now officially the world's most primitive bird.
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