Re: Jeholornis - long-tailed bird in today's Nature

[Ronald Orenstein <ornstn@rogers.com>]

Here'a a news report from Nature:

Early bird ate seeds
Gut contents of new-found fossil reveal ancient tastes.
25 July 2002
HENRY GEE

A new bird has joined the fossil flock. The size of a large crow, the beast 
lived sometime between 140 and 125 million years ago. It has a gut full of 
seeds - the first direct evidence of seed eating in a bird1.

Researchers Zhonghe Zhou and Fucheng Zhang of the Institute of Vertebrate 
Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, call their fossil 
Jeholornis prima. They found it in the Jiufotang Formation of north-eastern 
China, an area that has yielded many fossils of primitive birds as well as 
feathered dinosaurs.

The bird had large, strong wings. It also had a long, bony tail, like many 
dinosaurs, and like Archaeopteryx, the earliest known bird, and Rahonavis, 
a primitive bird from Madagascar.

Zhou and Zhang have gone to some pains to ensure that the tail of 
Jeholornis really does belong to its body. Two years ago a notorious 
long-tailed bird fossil, Archaeoraptor, was found to be a composite of a 
bird-like body and the tail of a dinosaur subsequently described as 
Microraptor.

Dinosaur days

The heyday of the dinosaurs was a golden age for bird evolution. 
Archaeopteryx, first reported in 1861, lived 150 million years ago in what 
is now southern Germany. More than a century later, this iconic fossil is 
still known from only a handful of specimens.

Clothed in feathers and with fully developed wings, Archaeopteryx had many 
primitive, reptilian features, including teeth and claws on its wing 
fingers. These traits made it the perfect 'transitional' fossil for the 
darwinian age.

Jeholornis prima is the latest in a host of ancient birds found recently 
from places as far afield as Spain, Madagascar and China that illuminate 
the earliest stages of bird evolution. They come from an interval somewhat 
later than that of Archaeopteryx but show that the major features of modern 
bird form were sketched out in this period.


References
Zhou, Z. & Zhang, F. A long-tailed, seed-eating bird from the Early 
Cretaceous of China. Nature, 418, 405 - 409, (2002).


© Nature News Service / Macmillan Magazines Ltd 2002



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Ronald I. Orenstein                           Phone: (905) 820-7886
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