By Laura
Geggel, Senior Writer | October 23, 2018 08:19am ET
ALBUQUERQUE,
N.M. — About 48 million years ago, an owl swooped down to catch its prey, not
by the light of the moon but in broad daylight.
How do
paleontologists know this fowl wasn't a night owl? They found the exquisitely
preserved remains of an owl, and its skull shares a telltale characteristic
with modern-day hawks, which also hunt by day, the researchers said.
The
finding is extraordinary, largely because it's rare to find fossilized owls,
especially one that has so many preserved bones, said project co-researcher
Elizabeth Freedman Fowler, an assistant professor at Dickinson State University
in North Dakota, who dubbed the specimen "the finest fossil owl." [Whooo Knew? 10
Superb Facts About Owls]
"There
is no fossil owl with a skull like this," Freedman Fowler told Live
Science. "Bird skulls are incredibly thin and fragile, so to have one
preserved still in three dimensions, even if slightly crushed, it's amazing. It
even has the hyoids at the bottom, the bones that attach to the tongue muscles."
The skull
is in such good shape that the researchers noticed that the supraorbital
processes (the regions above the eye sockets) have a bony overhang,
making it look as if the owl had a mini baseball cap on top of each eye,
according to the research, which was presented here at the 78th annual meeting
of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology on Oct. 19. The study has yet to be
published in a peer-reviewed journal.
This
overhang "gives you shade so you don't get dazzled [by the sun],"
said project lead research Denver Fowler, a curator of paleontology at the
Badlands Dinosaur Museum in North Dakota. This feature is weak or absent
in nocturnal
owls, but it's common in modern hawks and daytime owls, he noted.
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