Fossil of 99m-year-old bird with unusually long toes found

Ancient bird’s foot is so distinctive palaeontologists declare it a new species

Nur Pirbhai

Thu 11 Jul 2019 16.00 BSTLast modified on Mon 15 Jul 2019 11.58 BST

The fossilised remains of a bizarre, ancient bird that had middle toes longer than its lower legs have been found in a lump of amber from Myanmar.

The elongated toe resembles those seen on lemurs and tree-climbing lizards, and suggests an unusual lifestyle for some of the earliest birds that lived alongside the dinosaurs, researchers said.

“We have the leg of a little 99-million-year-old bird, preserved in amber, that shows a foot morphology unlike any known previously,” said Jingmai O’Connor, a vertebrate palaeontologist and co-author of the study at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The foot was so distinctive that O’Connor and her team declared the bird, which was probably about the size of a sparrow, a new species, naming it Elektorornis chenguangi. The first part of the name translates to “amber bird”. It is the first bird species to be recognised from amber.

The bird’s foot had four toes, with the third measuring 20% longer than the bird’s lower leg bone, and 41% longer than its second toe.

Scientists compared the bird to the only other known species that has such disproportionately long digits: the aye-aye, a type of lemur which uses its elongated fingers to pry larvae and insects out of tree trunks. The researchers believe that Elektorornis might have used its toes for similar purposes.

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99 Million-Year-Old Baby Bird Trapped in Amber Discovered in Myanmar

By Hannah Osborne On 6/8/17 at 10:11 AM

Researchers in Myanmar have discovered a 99 million-year-old baby bird encased in amber. The ancient hatchling died when it was just a few days or weeks old after a blob of sticky tree resin fell on it, leaving half of its body frozen in time.

Xing Lida, from the China University of Geosciences, led an international team of researchers in analyzing the three-inch specimen. Their study, published in the journal Gondwana Research, will help scientists better understand the toothed birds that lived alongside dinosaurs—and how they differ from birds living today.

The amber encases the bird’s skull, neck, a partial wing, a hind limb and one foot. The hatchling would have belonged to a group of birds called enantiornithines, that lived during the Cretaceous period, 145 to 65 million years ago. They died out during the mass extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs.

The National Geographic Society’s Expeditions Council partly funded the research. The fossil was mined from the Hukawng Valley in northern Myanmar.

Scientists discovered the bird was unusual in several ways—the structure of its wings was very similar to those seen in modern flying birds—but it retained some features that are seen in more primitive theropods, the group of dinosaurs from which modern birds emerged.

Chen Guang, curator of a museum in Yunnan and owner of the specimen, told Xinhua : "Many people thought it was a lizard. But the scales, thread-like feathers and sharp claws on the feet were so noticeable that I thought they must belong to a bird.”


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