By Brian Switek July 20
Prehistoric
creatures aren’t exactly renowned for their table manners. Most dinosaurs, for
example, were incapable of chewing and had to swallow their food whole. But
some ancient eaters were messier than others. And in southwestern Germany,
something especially sloppy left severed bird feet strewn about a dense fossil
boneyard.
The Messel Pit is
one of the greatest fossil sites in the world. Within stacks of
47-million-year-old oil shale is an unmatched record of life in and around an
ancient lake. There are early mammals preserved down to their fur, pairs of
turtles that somehow died in the middle of mating, dozens of plant species and
more than 1,000 bird skeletons. It’s the closest paleontologists can get to
actually walking through a humid Eocene forest.
Not all the Messel fossils are so
dazzlingly complete, though. At least eight isolated bird feet have been pulled
from the same stone. They were a curiosity, but mostly overlooked as experts
focused on studying and describing birds that were more intact. But now Natural
History Museum paleontologist Gerald
Mayr has
taken another look at the feet and come up with an explanation for how they
became violently separated from the rest of the avians they once belonged to.
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