Fossil remains may contain the world’s first bird specimen
Fossil remains may contain the world’s first bird specimen
By Eric Pfeiffer, Yahoo! News | The Sideshow – 5 hrs ago.
A fossil largely forgotten inside a Chinese museum might actually contain the world’s first bird.
Nature magazine reports that the Aurornis xui specimen was technically discovered by a Chinese farmer several years ago. But it had remained unidentified until paleontologist Pascal Godefroit stumbled across the fossil last year in the museum at the Fossil and Geology Park in Yizhou.
“In my opinion, it's a bird,” Godefroit, who is at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, told Nature. “But these sorts of hypotheses are very controversial. We’re at the origins of a group. The differences between birds and [nonavian] dinosaurs are very thin.”
Godefroit and his team of researchers have written a paper on the Aurornis xui that was published in the latest issue of Nature, where it is described as the "most primitive" bird specimen yet discovered.
So, why is there a debate on whether the specimen should be considered the world’s first bird?
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