Illustration of Falcatakely forsterae alongside dinosaurs. (Mark Witton)
ScienceAlert has a story about a "buck-toothed toucan". The animal, Falcatakely forsterae, lived about 68 million years ago during the late Cretaceous in what is now modern Madagascar. It was described in a paper in the journal Nature.
At less than nine centimetres (3.5 inches) long, the delicate skull of the bird scientists have dubbed Falcatakely forsterae might be easily overlooked.
In fact, it almost was, sitting in a backlog of excavated fossils for years before CT scanning suggested the specimen deserved more attention.
It turns out that its tall, scythe-like beak, while resembling the toucan, is something never before seen in the fossil record.
Birds in the Mesozoic era - between 250 million and 65 million years ago - had "relatively unspecialised snouts", Patrick O'Connor, lead author of a study on the new creature, told AFP.
"Falcatakely just changed the game completely, documenting a long, high beak unlike anything known in the Mesozoic," added O'Connor, professor of anatomy and neuroscience at Ohio University.
Abstract
Mesozoic birds display considerable diversity in size, flight adaptations and feather organization1,2,3,4, but exhibit relatively conserved patterns of beak shape and development5,6,7. Although Neornithine (that is, crown group) birds also exhibit constraint on facial development8,9, they have comparatively diverse beak morphologies associated with a range of feeding and behavioural ecologies, in contrast to Mesozoic birds. Here we describe a crow-sized stem bird, Falcatakely forsterae gen. et sp. nov., from the Late Cretaceous epoch of Madagascar that possesses a long and deep rostrum, an expression of beak morphology that was previously unknown among Mesozoic birds and is superficially similar to that of a variety of crown-group birds (for example, toucans). The rostrum of Falcatakely is composed of an expansive edentulous maxilla and a small tooth-bearing premaxilla. Morphometric analyses of individual bony elements and three-dimensional rostrum shape reveal the development of a neornithine-like facial anatomy despite the retention of a maxilla–premaxilla organization that is similar to that of nonavialan theropods. The patterning and increased height of the rostrum in Falcatakely reveals a degree of developmental lability and increased morphological disparity that was previously unknown in early branching avialans. Expression of this phenotype (and presumed ecology) in a stem bird underscores that consolidation to the neornithine-like, premaxilla-dominated rostrum was not an evolutionary prerequisite for beak enlargement.
