Paleontologists have described a new species of enantiornithine bird with a toothless beak from the Jehol avifauna of China. The discovery pushes back the earliest appearance of edentulism (toothlessness) in enantiornithines by approximately 48 million years.
Imparavis attenboroughi lived in what is now northeastern China some 120 million years ago (Early Cretaceous epoch).
This bird was a member of a group called Enantiornithes, or ‘opposite birds,’ named for a feature in their shoulder joints that is ‘opposite’ from what’s seen in modern birds.
Enantiornithines were once the most diverse group of birds, but they went extinct 66 million years ago following the meteor impact that killed most of the dinosaurs.
Paleontologists are still working to figure out why the enantiornithines went extinct and the ornithuromorphs, the group that gave rise to modern birds, survived.
“Enantiornithines are very weird. Most of them had teeth and still had clawed digits,” said Alex Clark, a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago and the Field Museum.
“If you were to go back in time 120 million years in northeastern China and walk around, you might have seen something that looked like a robin or a cardinal, but then it would open its mouth, and it would be filled with teeth, and it would raise its wing, and you would realize that it had little fingers.”
“Scientists previously thought that the first record of toothlessness in this group was about 72 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous.”
“This little guy, Imparavis attenboroughi, pushes that back by about 48 to 50 million years. So toothlessness, or edentulism, evolved much earlier in this group than we thought.”
The fossilized skeleton of Imparavis attenboroughi was found by an amateur fossil collector near the village of Toudaoyingzi in northeastern China and donated to the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature.
“I think what drew me to the specimen wasn’t its lack of teeth — it was its…
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