World's First Bird Fossil Found? Aurornis Xui Fossil Found in China Has Scientists Excited
The fossil of a creature found in China and dating back to the Jurassic period may be the oldest bird fossil ever found, with some speculating that it was the first bird ever.
The fossil was recovered at the Fossil and Geology Park in Yizhou, China, after a farmer had previously unearthed the relic years earlier in the Liaoning Province.
Researchers have stated that the fossil is a physical specimen of the most primitive of the avialans. Avialans is a classification that includes birds and related species along the division opposite of non-avian dinosaurs.
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"In my opinion, it's a bird," study author Pascal Godefroit, a paleontologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, told Nature News. "The differences between birds and [nonavian] dinosaurs are very thin."
Some researchers however, disagree that the classification of the fossil leads to the claim that this was the earliest known bird species.
"Traditionally, we have defined birds as things like Archaeopteryx and closer to things like modern birds," vertebrate paleontologist Luis Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, who was not involved in the study, told LiveScience.
"If you stick to the definition, this thing is not earliest known bird," Chiappe said, adding that this fossil "still helps us understand better the origin of birds."
The animal is known as Aurornis xui, and was a feathered dinosaur that lived about an estimated 150 million years ago during the Middle Jurassic period. It was roughly two feet long from beak tip to the end of its tail tip. It had small, sharp teeth and long forelimbs, which some scientists think led eventually to winged flight.
"According to our scenario, powered flight evolved along the avian lineage after its separation from other maniraptorans … powered flight probably evolved after early birds acquired more arboreal adaptations," said the researcher.
