When Mary was twenty-four, she made
another amazing discovery!
This creature didn’t have legs.
Or flippers.
It had WINGS!
Mary had unearthed a prehistoric flying reptile called a pterosaur.
from Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries
of Mary Anning, the First Paleontologist
words by Linda Skeers
pictures by Marta Álvarez Miguéns
Sourcebooks eXplore/Sourcebooks Kids, 2020
I thought maybe one of my kids would be fascinated by dinosaurs, then I thought maybe one of my grandkids would be, but no. I learned all about Thomas the Tank Engine, cars, mushrooms, construction vehicles, fairies, and Teletubbies, disasters at sea, and weather, but no dinosaurs.
We read lots and lots of books, but not about dinosaurs, real or imaginary.
So I got pretty excited when I heard about the missing link bird fossil discovered in São Paolo, Brazil in 2016, and reported on again just last week. Paleontologists have been working on this marvelously intact fossil since its discovery.
Because birds’ bones are so delicate, this find is extremely rare. Most bird fossils are crushed by time, and the weight of what falls on top of them practically squashes them into two dimensions.
Although the soft brain tissue has been lost to time, historical evidence and previous knowledge allowed scientists to piece this fossil together with “remarkable detail.” Newsweek Magazine reported that modern technology has enabled scientists to “digitally reconstruct the bird’s skull and brain…”.
The discovery bridges the period between the Paleozoic Era, when vertebrates and land plants first appeared, the Jurrasic Period of dinosaurs, and our own modern birds.
Navaornis hestiae, named after its discoverer William Nava, is a new species. It lived from about 15 million years before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs until tens of millions of years after the oldest pterodactyls, those bird-like dinosaurs, flew above them.
Luis Ciappe, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, says of the discovery, [It’s a] "relatively small bird, something the size of between a pigeon and a starling. It would have been an active flier, fully feathered.”
Researchers CT scanned the bird’s cranial cavity to accomplish the digital reconstruction of its brain. The portion of the cerebellum that controls flight in modern birds is not very well developed in Novaornis hestiae but, Chiappe continues, “features of the inner ear are greatly expanded, suggesting it used an alternative means of coordinating balance and flight.” The cerebrum, associated with higher level cognition, “is much larger than the bird-like dinosaurs that came before and almost as large as modern birds.”
Their presumed “cleverness” probably helped these “transitional birds” find food and shelter and encouraged the development of their social structure. It “represents a species at the midpoint along the evolutionary journey of bird cognition,” says David Field, the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at Cambridge's Museum of Zoology in the same Newsweek article.
The study of paleontology can help us moderns understand our own physical world. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both demonstrated that life during common time periods is more similar than life in similar geographic areas. That is, new species develop more readily over time than across miles.
Studying fossils, one might say, is irrelevant (or should be) in these days of fraught politics and Climate Catastrophe, but that is precisely why paleontology is crucial.
Adapted from the PLOS blog (Public Library of Science), Paleontology helps determine
Again from PLOS, “[the] parallel between the relevance of life’s history and the relevance of our cultural history is a good one. When paleontology is reduced to cataloging the weird things that once were, it instantly becomes as irrelevant to our own time as cultural or political history would be, if it were reduced to a list of things that once happened.” (italics mine)
I’m reading The Witches of Willow Cove by Josh Roberts (Owl Hollow Press, 2020). It’s his debut about a small town, being the “new girl,” and witches. Roberts combines the Salem witch trials of the 1690s with modern girls turning that magic age, 13. Spooky without being scary and modern yet drawing on history, this one is a highly readable tale with a touch of mystery.
stay curious (and learn from the past)
another amazing discovery!
This creature didn’t have legs.
Or flippers.
It had WINGS!
Mary had unearthed a prehistoric flying reptile called a pterosaur.
from Dinosaur Lady: The Daring Discoveries
of Mary Anning, the First Paleontologist
words by Linda Skeers
pictures by Marta Álvarez Miguéns
Sourcebooks eXplore/Sourcebooks Kids, 2020
I thought maybe one of my kids would be fascinated by dinosaurs, then I thought maybe one of my grandkids would be, but no. I learned all about Thomas the Tank Engine, cars, mushrooms, construction vehicles, fairies, and Teletubbies, disasters at sea, and weather, but no dinosaurs.
We read lots and lots of books, but not about dinosaurs, real or imaginary.
So I got pretty excited when I heard about the missing link bird fossil discovered in São Paolo, Brazil in 2016, and reported on again just last week. Paleontologists have been working on this marvelously intact fossil since its discovery.
Because birds’ bones are so delicate, this find is extremely rare. Most bird fossils are crushed by time, and the weight of what falls on top of them practically squashes them into two dimensions.
Although the soft brain tissue has been lost to time, historical evidence and previous knowledge allowed scientists to piece this fossil together with “remarkable detail.” Newsweek Magazine reported that modern technology has enabled scientists to “digitally reconstruct the bird’s skull and brain…”.
The discovery bridges the period between the Paleozoic Era, when vertebrates and land plants first appeared, the Jurrasic Period of dinosaurs, and our own modern birds.
Navaornis hestiae, named after its discoverer William Nava, is a new species. It lived from about 15 million years before the mass extinction of the dinosaurs until tens of millions of years after the oldest pterodactyls, those bird-like dinosaurs, flew above them.
Luis Ciappe, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, says of the discovery, [It’s a] "relatively small bird, something the size of between a pigeon and a starling. It would have been an active flier, fully feathered.”
Researchers CT scanned the bird’s cranial cavity to accomplish the digital reconstruction of its brain. The portion of the cerebellum that controls flight in modern birds is not very well developed in Novaornis hestiae but, Chiappe continues, “features of the inner ear are greatly expanded, suggesting it used an alternative means of coordinating balance and flight.” The cerebrum, associated with higher level cognition, “is much larger than the bird-like dinosaurs that came before and almost as large as modern birds.”
Their presumed “cleverness” probably helped these “transitional birds” find food and shelter and encouraged the development of their social structure. It “represents a species at the midpoint along the evolutionary journey of bird cognition,” says David Field, the Strickland Curator of Ornithology at Cambridge's Museum of Zoology in the same Newsweek article.
The study of paleontology can help us moderns understand our own physical world. Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin both demonstrated that life during common time periods is more similar than life in similar geographic areas. That is, new species develop more readily over time than across miles.
Studying fossils, one might say, is irrelevant (or should be) in these days of fraught politics and Climate Catastrophe, but that is precisely why paleontology is crucial.
Adapted from the PLOS blog (Public Library of Science), Paleontology helps determine
- the evolutionary identity of living and extinct organisms
- cause-and-effect relationships (how things actually change under different conditions)
- how rare events experienced in the past shed light on what our future may hold
- the relative magnitude of change in today’s world and how best to understand it
Again from PLOS, “[the] parallel between the relevance of life’s history and the relevance of our cultural history is a good one. When paleontology is reduced to cataloging the weird things that once were, it instantly becomes as irrelevant to our own time as cultural or political history would be, if it were reduced to a list of things that once happened.” (italics mine)
I’m reading The Witches of Willow Cove by Josh Roberts (Owl Hollow Press, 2020). It’s his debut about a small town, being the “new girl,” and witches. Roberts combines the Salem witch trials of the 1690s with modern girls turning that magic age, 13. Spooky without being scary and modern yet drawing on history, this one is a highly readable tale with a touch of mystery.
stay curious (and learn from the past)
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