Confuciusornis: Earliest Known Beaked Bird

Despite these characteristics that it shares with modern birds, Confuciusornis still shares some characteristics with dinosaurs. It still had long fingers on its wings, with sharp claws on these fingers. It also had not developed the hollow bones that make modern birds lighter, and make it easier for them to fly.

The paleontologists who have been working on Confuciusornis, Larry Martin, Zhonghe Zhou, Alan Feduccia, and Lianhai Hou, believe that although it is the earliest known bird with a toothless beak, Confuciusornis was not the ancestor of our modern birds. Instead, the ancestor of modern birds appeared about 70 million years after Confuciusornis. If more specimens of this interesting fossil find make their way to museums to be studied, perhaps we will learn more about the ancestry of birds.

More information about fossil birds:

University of California at Berkeley

In my next article, I will be writing about Acrocanthosaurus. The North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, in Raleigh, North Carolina re-opens next Friday, April 7th; the highlight of the new museum exhibits is its skeleton of Acrocanthosaurus atokensis, which only made it to the museum after a group of donors purchased it for the museum for $3 million.

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