which is the first of its kind to have evolved toothlessness. Illustration showing the fossil skeleton of Imparavis attenboroughi, alongside a reconstruction of the bird in life. Credit: Ville Sinkkonen.
All birds are dinosaurs, but not all dinosaurs fall into the specialized type of dinosaurs known as birds, sort of like how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. The newly describedwas a member of a group of birds called enantiornithines, or “opposite birds,” named for a feature in their shoulder joints that is “opposite” from what’s seen in modern birds.
“I think what drew me to the specimen wasn’t its lack of teeth– it was its forelimbs,” says O’Connor. “It had a giant bicipital crest– a bony process jutting out at the top of the upper arm bone, where muscles attach. I’d seen crests like that in Late Cretaceous birds, but not in the Early Cretaceous like this one. That’s when I first suspected it might be a new species.”
While Clark notes that “an animal is more than the sum of its parts, and we can’t fully know what an animal’s life was like just by looking at single components of its body,” he and his coauthors have been able to hypothesize about some of’s behavior and ecology, based on the details of its wings, feet, and beak together. “I like to think of these guys kind of acting like modern robins.
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