We found the world's oldest modern bird skull | Hacker News Reader

We found the world's oldest modern bird skull

natureecoevocommunity.nature.com

34 pointssohkamyung10 comments

I'm shocked at how modern this bird looks considering it coexisted with dinosaurs. I thought birds looked more like feathered reptiles at that point, but I guess Archaeopteryx is 125 million years ago (putting the new fossil half way between Arch' and us).

For what it's worth, a lot of theropods, such as the dromaeosaurs and ornithomimids, probably looked like giant birds with teeth. So the confusion goes both ways.

So cool. How many other uninteresting fossils are sitting around waiting to be scanned?

There's a Ian Banks short story where one of the omnipotent Culture spaceships visits the Earth and scans it on its whole and sees all the fossils every fossilized.

I always found this an fascinating thought. Imagine technology progresses so that we can just scan the whole earth, or at least large parts of the surface. Then you could look at everything ever fossilized in one go, and completely change natural history.

Do you remember the name?

Sometimes I get that feeling looking at the history of large software projects that have been around a while through upgrades, downgrades, branches, growth, layoffs, acquisitions, mergers etc etc. I like the sound of "whole earth scan".

The state of the earth

The fossil scan is just a sentence or so, not really a significant part of the plot.

The world's shortest tall person?

Basically that, but fossils are scarce enough that there are few enough known species so it makes sense.

It always "makes sense", but it focuses on the object while the real subject is the definition. I didn't click to see if the article was in fact about the definition of modern.

The article is about the bird. If you take a look at the images, you'll see it's so different from any bird-dinosaur that an explicit definition isn't necessary.

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