Soaring Prehistoric Skies

Paleontologists have found a fossil of the oldest known bird species with a beak. The 130 million year-old, crow-sized Confuciusornis dui was discovered last year in ancient lake sediments in China. It was so exquisitely preserved that impressions of its feathers were clearly visible.

The creature's beak was an advanced trait for its time, coming only 10 to 15 million years after the first known bird in the Jurassic period. But the toothy, reptile-like Archaeopteryx had a reptilian snout rather than a beak.

Prior to this discovery, the earliest known toothless, beaked bird dated from about 70 million years ago. The back of Confuciusornis dui's skull is primitive, with two openings behind the eyes that are a throwback to dinosaurs. What's unusual about the find is the upturned bill, similar to that of the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker.

"What you've got is a modern car engine hood on the rear end of a Model T," says Larry D. Martin, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Kansas' Museum of Natural History. He helped analyze the fossil.

The combination of primitive and advanced traits suggests that early bird evolution was more complex than previously thought and included many species that didn't succeed. "This is showing a diversity we didn't know about before," says Storrs L. Olson, curator of birds at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution. "It's not like you have this sort of straight-line evolution from one to another and each one getting more specialized."

Sankar Chatterjee, a professor of geology at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, agrees, "The story is much more complex. Evolution is not really like a ladder. It's more like a bush."

The bird, described in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, was analyzed by a joint team of American and Chinese researchers. Scientists believe the bird was an accomplished flyer, taking flight much like modern birds by scaling trees and jumping from a branch.

Confuciusornis dui is the smallest of its species found to date. The animal went extinct 120 million years ago and probably didn't lead to modern birds.

Hundreds of specimens of a larger type of Confuciusornis have also been found at the site, but all lacked an intact skull. Researchers believe the birds fell victim to volcanic eruptions that preserved their remains.