The Smithsonian has a piece about a recently rediscovered 70 million year old fossil bird from the Cretaceous Period. The specimen was originally found 25 years ago in the Kaiparowits Formation of the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. It's called Miracre eatoni, and it was about the size of a turkey vulture. It has been described in a new paper in the journal PeerJ.
The completeness of the fossil allowed researchers to figure out how the birds flew and shows that by the end of the Cretaceous some enantiornithines had developed many features that made them good flyers with traits similar to those that modern birds developed after the mass extinction.
“We know that birds in the early Cretaceous, about 115 to 130 million years ago, were capable of flight but probably not as well adapted for it as modern birds,” Atterholt says in a press release. “What this new fossil shows is that enantiornithines, though totally separate from modern birds, evolved some of the same adaptations for highly refined, advanced flight styles.”
