https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a46029478/ancient-bird-footprints-discovered/
POPULAR MECHANICS
The age of the dinosaurs never really ended—it only evolved. Birds (and their more reptilian cousins, the Crocodilia) are the modern-day legacy of dinosaur’s 165-million-year-long stint on Earth. While our avian friends’ Mesozoic origin story isn’t up for debate, the timing of when birds first arrived on Earth isn’t as clear cut.
Exhibit A in this prehistoric mystery is a series of bird-like footprints at the Maphutseng paleontological site in Lesotho. Drawing data from four sites—along with a detailed 262-foot-long set of fossil prints—scientists at the University of Cape Town (UCT) identified two types of footprints belonging to the Trisauropodiscus, a kind of three-toed dinosaur from the Late Triassic/Early Jurassic whose fossils are common across Africa.
One set of tracks resembles footprints found at other sites. But a second set is surprisingly similar to bird tracks, which were half the size of the other tracks, wider than they were taller, and contained slender toes. While these are all common attributes of bird tracks, there’s just one problem—true birds don’t arrive in the fossil record until some 60 million years later, in the Late Jurassic. UCT scientists published the results of their study last week in the journal PLOS ONE.
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“Fossil tracks of early birds and theropods, the co-existing dinosaurian ancestors of birds, co-occur in the rock record since the Early Cretaceous. However, the evolutionary transition from dinosaur to bird and the timing of the birds’ origin are still contested,” the paper reads. “That these tracks of southern Africa, dating to the Late Triassic, so strongly resemble Cenozoic and modern bird tracks substantiates the converging pedal morphology of Late Mesozoic archosaurs and firmly shows that the origin of bird-like foot morphology is at least ~210 million years old.”
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