Page 8 - National Poultry Newspaper

The author spotted this Tyrannosaurus-rex dinosaur earlier this year in Fremantle. Asteriornis gives a clear glimpse of what modern birds were like when T. rex was alive.
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Chickens have come a long way since dinosaur days.
Evolutionary wonder chicken
Page 8 – National Poultry Newspaper, April 2020
www.poultrynews.com.au
TWENTY years ago, near the border of Bel- gium and the Nether- lands, amateur fossil hunter Maarten van Dinther picked up a fea- tureless block of rock the size of a pack of cards.
Senckenberg Research finding anything more
Though he didn’t know it at the time, it contained a tiny and perfect skull from the oldest direct relative of modern birds ever discovered, a fowl that walked earth with dinosaurs.
Asteriornis was a long- legged shorebird that could probably fly and likely combed the beach- es of late Cretaceous Eu- rope, which had strings of islands in warm and shallow seas and a cli- mate similar to present- day Bahamas.
But birds from the late Cretaceous were rare, so he ran the fossils through a high-resolution CT scanner to visualise what was concealed in the rock.
Affectionately dubbed the ‘wonder chicken’ by the international team of scientists that analysed the fossil, it lived 66.7 million years ago, just 700,000 years before the asteroid impact that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs.
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and chickens, suggest- ing it was related to the shared ancestor of both groups, according to Na- tional Geographic.
Ornithologist and bird evolution expert at the
A palaeontologist at the University of Cambridge and study lead author Daniel Field said, “This is the first time we’ve seen the well-preserved skull of a modern bird from the age of dino- saurs.”
“It is the first modern bird skull from the entire Mesozoic era and one of the best preserved fossil bird skulls of any age,” Field said.
Named ‘Asteriornis’ in a paper published last month in Nature, the spe- cies – known from fossils of its hind limbs in ad- dition to its skull – has features similar to ducks
The skulls of living chickens and ducks “are very different in the pre- sent day, so the skull of Asteriornis provides the first glimpse we’ve ever had at what the skull of the most recent common ancestor of these groups probably looked like.”
The study authors named the new species after Asteria, the Greek Titan goddess of falling stars, who transformed herself into a quail – an appropriate name for a bird which lived shortly before the impact that marked the end of the dinosaur era.
Institute in Frankfurt Germany, Gerald Mayr, who was not part of the new study, described it as an extraordinary and exciting find, which re- vealed insights into a poorly known chapter of avian evolution.
exciting than broken limb bones.
Other living bird groups thought to have appeared during the Cretaceous period include the Pale- ognath birds, such as os- triches, emus, rheas and cassowaries.
Several finds in recent years shed light on the prehistoric origins of liv- ing bird groups and how these animals survived one of the biggest ex- tinction events in earth’s history.
Paleognaths, Anseri- formes, 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.
Because many of the oldest fossils of modern birds are from the south- ern hemisphere, includ- ing the previous record- holder for oldest modern bird, Vegavis from Ant- arctica, some palaeontol- ogists suggested modern birds originated on the southern supercontinent of Gondwana during the time of the dinosaurs.
After finding the ‘won- der chicken’ fossils in 2000, van Dinther donat- ed the specimens to the Natural History Museum of Maastricht in the Neth- erlands.
But this new discov- ery of a bird older than Vegavis in the northern hemisphere challenged this theory.
The curator of the mu- seum and co-author of the new study, John Jagt, sent the four small blocks of rock, with limb bones poking out, to Field in 2018.
“At this point I think the only thing we can say for sure is that the geographic origins of modern birds are truly mysterious,” Field said.
From the outward ap- pearance of the fossils, Field had low hopes of
“Only future fossil dis- coveries will be able to tell us where on earth modern birds originated.”
He and his PhD student Juan Benito were stag- gered to discover a beau- tifully preserved, nearly complete 3D skull of a modern bird.