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Published online 15 June 2006 | Nature | doi:10.1038/news060612-12
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Early bird makes a splash
Chinese fossil points to aquatic origins for today's birds.
Newly found fossils from China suggest that the ancestors of present-day birds may have been waterfowl. Be they pelicans or penguins, bowerbirds or budgies, all of today's roughly 10,000 species of bird might trace their roots back to an ancestor that splashed into life in a pond or lake some 110 million years ago, in the early part of the Cretaceous period.
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