Jeholornis was a raven-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago, among the earliest examples of dinosaurs evolving into birds, in what’s now China. The fossils that have been found are finely preserved but smashed flat, the result of layers of sediment being deposited over the years. That means that no one’s been able to get a good look at Jeholornis’s head. But in a new study, researchers digitally reconstructed a Jeholornis skull, revealing details about its eyes and brain that shed light on its vision and sense of smell.
Jeholornis was a raven-sized bird that lived 120 million years ago, among the earliest examples of dinosaurs evolving into birds, in what’s now China. The fossils that have been found are finely preserved but smashed flat, the result of layers of sediment being deposited over the years. That means that no one’s been able to get a good look at Jeholornis’s head. But in a new study, researchers digitally reconstructed a Jeholornis skull, revealing details about its eyes and brain that shed light on its vision and sense of smell.
„Jeholornis is my favorite Cretaceous bird, it has a lot of unusual, primitive traits, and it helps shed light on the bigger story of how different birds evolved,“ says Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum and one of the authors of the paper describing the discovery in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society. „This study is the first time we’re really getting at what this bird’s skull looked like, what its brain must have been like, which is really exciting.“
The study’s first author, Han Hu, went through roughly 100 fossils at China’s Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature and selected the one with the best-preserved skull—still a little flattened, but intact. „It is very difficult to find the right skull among around 100 fossils, since we won’t know if one skull will provide us the information we want before the scanning, and due to the costs of high quality scanning, we couldn’t scan all those specimens to choose the best one. However, I chose this one because at least from the exposed surface, it is relatively complete, and which is also important is that this skull is preserved to be isolated from other parts of its body,“ says Hu, a researcher at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford, UK.
„This is very helpful since we usually won’t chop the skull off from the skeleton if they are articulated—no one wants to hurt these previous fossils, but an isolated skull will reduce the size of the scanning area, which will increase the scanning quality a lot.
