Source: Discovery Online June 20, 1999

New Bird Species Lived With Dinos

By Michael Milstein, Discovery News Brief

Scientists have identified a new fossil bird from China they say was already soaring among the trees while dinosaurs roamed the land, challenging the argument that dinosaurs gradually took flight and evolved into birds.

Long tail feathers that for a ground dweller would have dragged in the dirt, claws clearly meant for perching in trees and narrow feathers suited for long-distance flying all suggest that Confuciusornis dui was designed to soar, not walk, researchers say in this week’s journal Nature.

"All in all, it has all the characteristics of a tree-dwelling bird, not an earth-bound dinosaur," says Alan Feduccia, a biology professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and member of the research team. "It tells us that bird evolution was very complex, not linear as the people advocating a dinosaur origin of birds would have us believe."

Although fossil birds have turned up in increasing numbers in China in recent years, Confuciusornis dui represents the most complete specimen known from its time, 130 million years ago -- roughly halfway through the age of the dinosaurs.

It's slightly smaller than its relative Confuciusornis sanctus, known from the same fossil deposits. It's also the oldest known bird with a toothless, horny beak -- further evidence that birds were by then evolutionarily independent from toothy dinosaurs, the new study says.

But others maintain that one bird flitting through ancient skies wouldn't have kept its dinosaur contemporaries from evolving into other lines of birds, too.

“It’s interesting, but it’s certainly not earth-shattering,” says paleontologist Kenneth Carpenter of the Denver Museum of Natural History. “It’s not going to stop all the important work that’s establishing the connection between dinosaurs and birds.”

While the new bird’s upturned beak was advanced, the rear of its skull bore two small openings reminiscent of very primitive reptilian ancestors. Such a striking blend of new and old suggests that evolution is far from orderly and the idea that dinosaurs smoothly took to the air as birds may be simplistic.

The skull of Confuciusornis dui "had a front end like the space shuttle and a rear end like a Model-T," says paleontologist Larry Martin of the University of Kansas, who co-authored the Nature paper.