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Abstract For centuries, fossils from the Maastrichtian type locality and adjacent quarries have provided key evidence of vertebrate diversity during the latest Cretaceous, yet until recently the Maastrichtian type area had revealed no important insights into the evolutionary history of birds, one of the world’s most conspicuous groups of extant tetrapods. With the benefit of high-resolution micro-CT scanning, two important avian fossils from the Maastrichtian type area have now been examined in detail, offering profound, complementary insights into the evolutionary history of birds. The holotype specimens of these new taxa,Janavis finalidensBenito, Kuo, Widrig, Jagt and Field, 2022, andAsteriornis maastrichtensisField, Benito, Chen, Jagt and Ksepka, 2020, were originally collected in the late 1990s, but were only investigated in detail more than twenty years later. Collectively,JanavisandAsteriornisprovide some of the best evidence worldwide regarding the factors that influenced stem bird extinction and crown bird survivorship through the Cretaceous-Palaeogene transition, as well as insights into the origins of key anatomical features of birds such as an extensively pneumatised postcranial skeleton, a kinetic palate, and a toothless beak.Asteriornisalso provides scarce evidence of a Cretaceous-aged divergence time calibration within the avian crown group, while together,JanavisandAsteriornisconstitute the only documented co-occurrence of crown birds and non-neornithine avialans. Here, we review key insights into avian evolutionary history provided by these discoveries from the Maastrichtian stratotype, document undescribed and newly discovered Maastrichtian fossils potentially attributable to Avialae and provide the first histological data for the holotype ofAsteriornis, illustrating its skeletal maturity at the time of its death.
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Late Cretaceous neornithine from Europe illuminates the origins of crown birds.
Our understanding of the earliest stages of crown bird evolution is hindered by an exceedingly sparse avian fossil record from the Mesozoic era. The most ancient phylogenetic divergences among crown birds are known to have occurred in the Cretaceous period but stem-lineage representatives of the deepest subclades of crown birds—Palaeognathae (ostriches and kin), Galloanserae (landfowl and waterfowl) and Neoaves (all other extant birds)—are unknown from the Mesozoic era. As a result, key questions related to the ecology, biogeography and divergence times of ancestral crown birds remain unanswered. Here we report a new Mesozoic fossil that occupies a position close to the last common ancestor of Galloanserae and fills a key phylogenetic gap in the early evolutionary history of crown birds. Asteriornis maastrichtensis, gen. et sp. nov., from the Maastrichtian age of Belgium (66.8–66.7 million years ago), is represented by a nearly complete, three-dimensionally preserved skull and associated postcranial elements. The fossil represents one of the only well-supported crown birds from the Mesozoic era, and is the first Mesozoic crown bird with well-represented cranial remains. Asteriornis maastrichtensis exhibits a previously undocumented combination of galliform (landfowl)-like and anseriform (waterfowl)-like features, and its presence alongside a previously reported Ichthyornis-like taxon from the same locality provides direct evidence of the co-occurrence of crown birds and avialan stem birds. Its occurrence in the Northern Hemisphere challenges biogeographical hypotheses of a Gondwanan origin of crown birds, and its relatively small size and possible littoral ecology may corroborate proposed ecological filters that influenced the persistence of crown birds through the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1655736
- PAR ID:
- 10188143
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Nature
- Volume:
- 579
- ISSN:
- 1476-4687
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 397-401
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2096-0
