67 million years ago, most birds had teeth.
And some of these Cretaceous birds could be much closer than the experts thought to their descendants who today roam our skies, the last representatives of the dinosaurs, which dominated the world until the terrible Cretaceous-Tertiary crisis, caused by the fall of a meteorite in the Yucatan Peninsula.
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But what is known about the evolutionary origin of our modern birds could be called into question by an ancient bird fossil dubbed
Janavis finalidens,
recently unearthed in Belgium (
Nature, November 30, 2022
).
The work carried out on the specimen shows that the birds that were thought to be ancient would in fact be the modern ones, and vice versa.
Modern birds (known as "neorniths") are divided into two large groups that are unbalanced in number.
The first group, called "neognaths", is the most common;
it is that of pigeons, seagulls but also eagles,…
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