An Unknown Bird Dated To Jurassic Period And Capable Of Flight

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Researchers from LMU Munich present an unknown bird dated to the late Jurassic period. It is the second bird capable of flight, after the famous Archaeopteryx, to be identified from this era.

Model of Archaeopteryx. Image: Rodney Start. Source: Museum Victoria

Researchers led by Professor Oliver Rauhut have identified a bird unknown until now: Alcmonavis poeschli, the second bird from the era identified as capable of flight.

“This suggests that the diversity of birds in the late Jurassic era was greater than previously thought,” Professor Oliver Rauhut, paleontologist at the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences as well as the Bavarian State Collection of Paleontology and Geology, said in a press release.

Archaeopteryx lived here in a landscape of reef islands about 150 million years ago.

Archaeopteryx’s throne is tottering. Since the discovery of the first fossil of the primal bird in 1861, it had been considered the only bird from the Jurassic geological period. Today’s birds are thought to be direct descendants of carnivorous dinosaurs, with Archaeopteryx representing the oldest known flying representative of this lineage.

The illustration shows the wing of Alcmonavis poeschli as it was found in the limestone slab. Alcmonavis poeschli is the second known specimen of a volant bird from the Jurassic period.

All of the specimens that have been found up to now come from the region of the Solnhofen Archipelago, which during the Jurassic era spanned across what is today the Altmühl Valley, in the area between Pappenheim and Regensburg.

Only a wing of Alcmonavis poeschli was discovered.

“At first, we assumed that this was another specimen of Archaeopteryx. There are similarities, but after detailed comparisons with Archaeopteryx and other, geologically younger birds, its fossil remains suggested that we were dealing with a somewhat more derived bird,” says Rauhut.

Alcmonavis poeschli was not merely somewhat larger than Archaeopteryx; apparently it could also fly better.

“The wing muscles indicate a greater capacity for flying,” says Rauhut. Alcmonavis poeschli exhibits numerous traits lacking in Archaeopteryx but present in more recent birds. This suggests that it was adapted better to active, flapping flight.

The bird now being described for the first time derives its name from the old Celtic word for the river Altmühl, Alcmona, and its discoverer Roland Pöschl, who leads the excavation at the Schaudiberg quarry close to Mörnsheim. A fossil of Archaeopteryx was also discovered in the same unit of limestones. The two primal birds thus apparently lived at the same time in what was then a subtropical lagoon landscape in southern Germany.

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Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer