A bird skull fossil that was found twenty years ago in the limestone of St. Pietersberg near Maastricht appears to be the oldest fossil of a modern bird found so far.
Scientists who published their find on Wednesday discovered this in the journal Nature.
The skull of about 66.7 million years old belongs to an ancestor of the chickens, ducks and geese. The beast with the nickname ‘wonderchicken’ can provide new insights into the earliest stages in the evolution of modern birds.
The hitherto unknown bird has been given the scientific name Asteriornis Maastrichtensis. The skull was discovered last year when Cambridge University made a CT scan of the fossil, which at first glance consisted only of a few bone fragments that protruded from a piece of limestone. “This is one of the best-preserved bird fossil skulls ever,” said study leader Daniel Field.
The little bird, 30 centimeters in length and weighing about 390 grams, lived in the time of the dinosaurs along the coast of the subtropical sea, where Maastricht now lies, just before a meteorite shower ended the era. It is the first fossil of a modern bird discovered in the Northern Hemisphere.
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A three-dimensional representation of the ‘miracle chicken’ skull found (photo: Daniel J. Field)
‘Europe played an important role in bird evolution’
“This discovery provides the first evidence that Europe played an important role in the early evolutionary history of modern birds,” said John Jagt to science website Scimex. Jagt is one of the researchers of the ‘wonder chicken’ and a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in Maastricht.
“At that time there were also fish-eating birds with teeth. They were found in the Sint Pietersberg in Maastricht in the same layer as where this skull was found. The toothed birds were a kind of flying mini-dinosaurs,” Jagt told broadcaster. Limburg 1. “But those toothed fish eaters did not survive the meteorite impact of 66 million years ago. The toothless specimens, they could expand afterwards.”
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