Early birds were capable of performing aerodynamic feats in a manner similar to their modern-day counterparts, according to a team of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, the University of Bristol and the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
The right wing of a 125-million-year-old enantiornithine bird from the Early Cretaceous of Spain: photograph and interpretive drawing of slab. Image credit: Navalón, G. et al.
The team, headed by Dr Luis M. Chiappe of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, studied the exceptionally well-preserved right wing of a 125-million-year-old enantiornithine bird (Lower Cretaceous) from the limestones of Las Hoyas, Spain.
Beyond the bones preserved in the fossil, the tiny wing of this bird reveals details of a complex network of muscles that in modern birds controls the fine adjustments of the wing’s main feathers, allowing birds to master the sky.
The presence of these structures in the wing of such a primitive bird supports the notion that at least some of the most ancient birds were capable of performing aerodynamic feats in a fashion similar to those of many living birds.
“It’s very surprising that despite being skeletally quite different from their modern counterparts, these primitive birds show striking similarities in their soft anatomy,” said Guillermo Navalón, a Ph.D. student at the University of Bristol.
“The anatomical match between the fibers preserved in the fossil and those that characterize the wings of living birds strongly indicates that some of the earliest birds were capable of aerodynamic prowess like many present-day birds,” Dr Chiappe added.
Shanweiniao cooperorum, a long-snouted enantiornithine bird from the Early Cretaceous of China. Image credit: Nobu Tamura / CC BY 3.0.
Primitive birds may have flown over the heads of dinosaurs but some aspects of the precise flight modes of these early fliers still remain unclear.
“Fossils such as this are an open window to deep time and allow scientists access to the most intricate aspects of the early evolution of the flight of birds,” said Dr Jesús Marugán Lobón of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid.
The results were published online this week in the journal Scientific Reports.
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Navalón, G. et al. 2015. Soft-tissue and dermal arrangement in the wing of an Early Cretaceous bird: Implications for the evolution of avian flight. Sci. Rep. 5, 14864; doi: 10.1038/srep14864
