Ville Sinkkonen / Field Museum Chicago
Artistic representation of specimens of Plumadraco; on the left, the fossil that was found in the Tianyu Museum
The fossil of a newly identified, robin-sized bird species called Plumaco bankswhich lived about 121 million years ago, preserved almost all of its plumage, including its tail feathers — which were twice as long as its body.
A 121-million-year-old fossil, which was preserved in a museum in Shandong, China, led to the identification of a new species that inhabited the region during the Cretaceous period.
The new species, which had a tail so impressive it was nicknamed “feathered dragon“, was described in a published on Wednesday in the magazine PLOS One.
Birds have all kinds of extravagant ornaments to attract partners — male peacocks display a fan of feathers adorned with glittering blue eyespots, birds of paradise perform courtship dances that highlight their fluffy plumes, and female mallards choose males by their bright green heads and bright yellow beaks.
The new fossil discovery demonstrates that the exuberant ornamentation of birds dates back to the time of the dinosaurs: the tail feathers of the Plumaco banks they were twice as long as his body. The tail feathers of its closest rival, Junornis, reached only about 1.6 times the length of your body, note the .
«Plumadraco had the size of a robinbut its tail feathers measured about thirty centimeters longtwice the length of your body”, he says Alex Clarkresearcher at the Field Museum and the University of Chicago and lead author of the study.
«They are one of the proportionally longest tail feathers ever found in a fossil bird».
The birds are the only members of the dinosaur family who managed to survive the consequences of an asteroid impact on Earth, 66 million years ago — which, collaterally, .
This means that all the birds you’ve ever metfrom sparrows to pigeons, including Plumadraco, they are dinosaurs.
However, the asteroid impact. The most diverse group of birds alive at the time, the enantiornithinesbecame extinct along with non-avian dinosaurs.
The Plumadraco lived about 121 million years ago, during the Cretaceous, long before the great extinction event, but was part of the enantiornithine group.
Clark came across the fossil during a research visit to the Tianyu Museum in Shandong, China, accompanied by his advisor and co-author, the curator of the Field Museum Jingmai O’Connor. While examining hundreds of fossil birds, one of them particularly caught his attention.
“I saw this little one and had to look again to believe it when I noticed the tail feathers,” says Clark. “I’m very interested in the way birds display to attract mates, and I thought these tail feathers were so extraordinary that had to be used for something like this».
Ville Sinkkonen / Field Museum Chicago
Plumadraco’s tail was…monumental
Clark and his colleagues analyzed the fossil, comparing it with other enantiornithine birds, and concluded that it was a new species to science.
The team named it Plumadraco bankoorum, “the feathered dragon of the Banko”, in honor of the father and son duo Winston and Paul Bankowho have dedicated decades to the study and protection of live birds.
It is difficult determine the sex of a fossil animal, since the soft tissues of the sexual organs are rarely preserved. However, the length of Plumadraco’s tail feathers indicates that the specimens identified in this study were probably males.
«There are many examples of modern birds, both males and females, with long, showy feathers, butthere appears to be a certain threshold from which, when the feathers reach a certain proportional length, this tends to be a characteristic developed by males to attract females”, explains Clark, in a statement published on .
“Furthermore, the fossils of some other enantiornithine birds show traces of muscle tissue along the caudal region and, based on these muscles, birds like the Plumadraco would have a very limited tail movement“Clark notes.
“However, could shake their tail feathers up and down, a behavior that we observe today in birds that perform courtship displays exclusively on males», he concludes.
The rigid spikes in the center of Plumadraco’s tail feathers, and the tapered shape ending in a rounded tip, suggest that males raised their tail feathers, the ends of which moved from side to side in a sort of ‘quiver’ movement.
The team also obtained feather color information flow rates Plumadraco. Using a portable mass spectrometer, a chemical instrument that looks vaguely like a ray gun, they analyzed the chemical composition of the fossil.
Based on the concentrations of the different chemical compounds present, the feathers of the Plumadraco they were probably dark brown or black.
It is possible that there was some kind of eye-catching color on the ends of the tail feathers, perhaps something iridescent or blue, since these colors are produced by the structure of the cells and not by the pigments whose chemical signatures were measured in this study.
“This fossil, perhaps more than any other bird fossil ever discovered, demonstrates that birds have been developing expensive featureselongated and specialized to attract partners for a long, long time», says Clark.
“Based on these fossils, female choice in selecting ornate males has played a fundamental role in how birds look and behave for more than 120 million years,” concludes the researcher.
