Palaeo News: Cretaceous bird with a dinosaur skull

One of the confusing problems of understanding the evolutionary origin of birds is the fact that all the bones in a bird skull are fused together. This makes it difficult to identify individual bones and work out how they relate to other creatures.

That’s why the announcement in Nature today so important. In it a small primitive bird skeleton is described with a skull where the bones are not fused together. The fossil comer from early Cretaceous deposits in China. The skeleton is that of a juvenile but the structure of the palate and the arrangement of holes in the back of the skull are more typical of a dinosaurian ancestor.

Read the original paper here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-021-24147-z