May 6, 2015, 10:07 London, May 6 (PL) paleontologists and biologists from China and Australia found two fossils of 130 million years of a kind of Cretaceous birds, they called Archaeornithura meemannae reflected the latest issue of the journal Nature Communications.
The remains were taken from the second tank oldest fossils of birds in the world, Sichakou basin in northeast China. It is the oldest specimens of Ornithuromorpha, the group from which modern birds descended.
Scholars estimate that Ornithuromorphas represented half of the bird species that period. The other flying more abundant, Enantiornithes, disappeared during the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction 66 million years ago.
The stratigraphic and radiometric analysis of geological strata dating to this species makes 130.7 million of years during the Cretaceous. Previous fossils of this evolutionary branch was 125 million years ago.
This discovery therefore extends the lifetime of Ornithuromorphas between five and six million years ago and go back to the Cretaceous the time divergence occurred early bird lineages, the researchers highlighted.
According to the description of the study, the animals had a plumage that covered almost the entire body and had an anatomy that allowed them to maneuver during the flight.
The length of the legs and no feathers in the -hueso tibiotarsus between the femur and the tarsometatarsus in the leg of a AVE- indicates that served as stilts to live in the water, Consistent with the characteristics of other similar fossils.
These features allow classification of the new species within the family of Hongshanornithidae, made up of small waterfowl long-legged wading in proportion to the size of the wings.
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