It was like a very small chicken, but it could bite you. It had elongated legs, twice as long as its thighs. Something very strange, because in most dinosaurs it happened the other way around. It weighed less than a kilo: 641 grams, approximately. And it is believed that it measured between 50 and 90 centimeters, like pheasants. they called him fuijianvenator prodigiosus. It lived 150 million years ago, as old as the “first bird.”
“I would say it’s strange,” Min Wang, the study leader, said of the finding, when asked to describe it. The fossil was discovered last year, in what is now Fujian province, in southeast China. fuijianvenator prodigiosus means precisely “Fujian Strange Hunter” In latin. Classifying it as a bird will depend on how we define a bird, Wang said. “It is far from being similar to any modern bird,” he explained to Reuters.
so to fujianvenator they included it a group called “avials”, which includes all birds and their closest non-avian dinosaur relatives. His tibia was twice as long as his thigh bone, the femur. This is unique among theropods, a group that includes all meat-eating dinosaurs such as the Tyrannosaurus. She also had a long tail.
The researchers proposed two possible lifestyles for this dinosaur bird. It was one of those that ran fast or, on the contrary, an animal that walked slowly in a swampy environment, like modern cranes or herons. “I would bet my money on the broker”Wang commented.
The discovery of the dinosaur bird, a stroke of luck
Scientists cannot know if funjianvenator could fly. Probably not, Wang said. The skeletal features did not favor him in this regard. For example, he had a shortened shoulder blade and specialized fingers for grasping.
The fossil has no feathers, but its known relatives did. That’s why, the group imagines it as a feathered animal. In the area where this dinosaur bird was found, the researchers also found fossils of fish, turtles, and other aquatic reptiles.
The find was made in a swampy area near Nanping, where dinosaurs had never been found before. That’s why the team says it was a stroke of luck. Besides, bird-like dinosaur remains from the late Jurassic are hard to find. Their hollow bones are very fragile, which is why they are worse preserved. Its fossilization needs ideal conditions, such as the absence of oxygen. Conditions that lakes or swamps can provide.
Scientists are fascinated. Due to its age, it is one of the first bird-like dinosaurs, so it may be a key case to better understand their origin.
On the evolution of dinosaurs and the origin of birds
Many paleontologists believe that the first bird was a 150-million-year-old feathered dinosaur called Archeopteryx. Their fossils were found in Germany. It is a crow-sized bird with a long tail and no beak, first discovered in the 19th century.
Dinosaurs became largely extinct 66 million years ago. This study is new evidence that before, at the time of the Archeopteryx, dinosaurs had already diversified into different types of birdsexplained Mark Loewen, a paleontologist at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, who was not involved in the discovery published in Nature.
fujianvenator it also helps fill in some gaps in the evolutionary history of birds. In the fossil record, there is a gap of about 20 million years between the Archeopteryx and the next bird found.
“There are so many things left to discover,” Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, a paleontologist at Yale University, told Nature. “We have only scratched the surface of the anatomical and lifestyle diversity of these animals.”