This suggests relatedness with today’s waterfowl and land fowl.Trevor Worthy, a paleontologist at Flinders University who was not involved in the study, said that “until now, we have had no fossil birds that can be considered the ancestor” of the duck and chicken group, or of the group that contains ducks, chickens, and It also supports an image that many paleontologists love: “that modern chickens and other fowl are living fossils, hardly modified since the days of the dinosaurs,” Dr. Bhullar said.Thomas Stidham, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who was not involved in the study, said that this is an “exciting discovery.” But other, less complete modern bird fossils from a similar time period have been found in the Northern Hemisphere.

But birds from the late Cretaceous are rare, so he decided to run the fossils through a high-resolution CT scanner to visualize what was concealed within the rock.He and one of his PhD students, Juan Benito, were staggered to discover “a beautifully preserved, nearly complete, 3D skull of a modern bird,” Field says.

However, this piqued their interest enough to conduct high-resolution CT scans of the specimen in a laboratory at the University of Cambridge, which revealed the hidden skull. Facebook. "Without these cutting-edge scans, we never would have known that we were holding the oldest modern bird skull in the world.

Field hopes that the Wonderchicken’s surprise appearance will spur fossil hunters to search for more complete fossils in Europe and North America that could fill gaps in our knowledge of bird evolution.He also hopes there is another lesson: “Look more carefully at specimens that, at first glance, might look kind of uninspiring,” he said.What to Name the Oldest Modern Bird Fossil? "We thought it was an appropriate name for a creature that lived just before the end-Cretaceous asteroid impact," Daniel Ksepka, a co-author of the study from the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut, said in a statement. Introduction into Western Europe came far later, about the 1st millennium BC.

"The study also implies that the group of birds that includes the ostrich, the rhea, the emu, and the kiwi were also present by this time period, and that they must have evolved in a very short burst of time. Below are 5 very interesting reasons why scientists are confident that the chicken is T. rex’s closest living relative. "The fact that the fossil was found in Europe is incredibly exciting, because it suggests that future discoveries of even older modern birds might come from Europe. "This is an incredibly informative specimen," Amy Balanoff, a paleontologist at Johns Hopkins University who wasn’t involved in the study, told Kevin Padian, a paleontologist at the University of California-Berkeley, who also wasn't involved in the research, said the fossil provides the best evidence yet of when and how the earliest ancestors of today’s birds evolved.

WonderchickenA 3D view of the wonderchicken’s skull. Such fossils include the bones of a “The specimen is beautiful, the first really nice Neornithine from the Cretaceous,” says Jingmai O’Connor, an expert on fossil birds at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China, who was not part of the new study.Until now, most fossils of birds from the Cretaceous that were related to living species have been “fragmentary and dubious,” she says, but the new discovery hints at the potential to find additional well-preserved modern bird relatives that lived prior to the impact and extinction event.A 3D-printed, life-size model of the fossil skull of The skulls of living chickens and ducks “are very different in the present day, so the skull of Other living bird groups that are thought to have appeared during the Cretaceous period include the Paleognath birds, such as ostriches, emus, rheas, and cassowaries. "This bird belongs to the group that you could informally call poultry," he told "For example, the poultry group is closely related to the other living groups of birds like crows, woodpeckers, warblers, and the like.

“Only future fossil discoveries will be able to tell us where on Earth modern birds originated.”

Given the bones were found in marine sediments, they suggest the wonderchicken may have spent its life by the shore at a time when the coastal environment of this part of northern Europe may have resembled those of today's tropical islands.

"Initially, the researchers could only see few small fragments of leg bone sticking out of the piece of rock. This is the earliest modern bird skull ever seen, and is the first time a modern bird skull has been found from the Age of Dinosaurs. Paleognaths, Anseriformes, and Galliformes are some of the deepest branches in the family tree of modern birds, and many other bird groups may not have appeared until after the asteroid impact.After finding the ‘wonderchicken’ fossils in 2000, van Dinther donated the specimens to the Natural History Museum of Maastricht in the Netherlands. Experts have discovered a fossil of the world’s oldest known modern bird – a diminutive creature about half the size of a mallard duck. The location of the find is also significant in and of itself the researchers say. We believe that several features exhibited by According to the researchers, the latest findings indicate modern birds emerged shortly before the devastating impact. )"We have known for a while that the earliest stages of modern bird evolutionary history took place towards the end of the Age of Dinosaurs, but we haven't had much direct evidence of modern birds from the fossil record of that time," Field said. Way back in 2000 a fossil collector in Belgium found what looked like the remains of a tiny chicken dinner sticking out of a rock.