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Poultry through time

A newly discovered 66.7-million-year-old fossil bird excavated in Belgium provides us with the best evidence so far for understanding when the living groups of birds first evolved and began to diverge.
  1. Kevin Padian

    1. Kevin Padian is in the Department of Integrative Biology and the Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.

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The living groups of birds are amazingly diverse, numbering some 10,000 species, and endlessly fascinating. But when did they first evolve? The answer depends on how you define a bird, how you recognize the most basal (earliest diverging) birds in the fossil record, and how you account for the palaeontological and genetic gaps in our knowledge of bird evolution. Writing in Nature, Field et al.1 report the discovery of a fossil bird from 66.7 million years (Myr) ago, during the Late Cretaceous period, the most recent point in time currently known when the first representatives of today’s birds evolved. In the process, the authors offer what might be a useful corrective to genetics-based estimates of the timing of bird diversification.

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Nature 579, 351-352 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-00766-2

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