The tiny fossil dates to more than 66 million years ago. "This is one of the best-preserved fossil bird skulls of any age." The fossil provides the best evidence yet of when and how the earliest ...

Right: This 3-D reconstruction of an Ichthyornis skull is based on high-resolution CT scans of fossils found in Kansas. “Bird skulls are at a real premium among paleontologists, as they don’t ...

The discovery of Vegavis iaai’s skull supports the theory that at least some modern bird lineages survived the extinction ...

an almost perfectly preserved ancient bird skull. “It just totally blew our minds,” Dr. Field said. The fossil, described by Dr. Field and colleagues today in Nature, is between 66.7 and 66.8 ...

Paleontologists have uncovered an exceptionally complete skull of a massive bird that lived 45 million years ago. This ...

"This is one of the best-preserved fossil bird skulls of any age, from anywhere in the world. We almost had to pinch ourselves when we saw it, knowing that it was from such an important time in ...

But three-dimensional images of the fossilized skull created with computed tomography, a type of X-ray imaging, revealed that the Mesozoic bird had little else in common with today’s nectar ...

But previous fossils of the bird didn’t include much of the skull. That hampered scientists’ ability to assess where exactly V. iaai fits in birds’ family tree — whether it was a primitive ...

It was bird-like, but in a strange and ancient way. The amber contains the skull of Oculudentavis khaungraae, a newly described dinosaur and one of the smallest ever discovered. Its tiny stature ...

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Nearly 20 years later, a 2011 Antarctic expedition turned up a bird skull that more recently was matched with Vegavis iaai. In an analysis published Wednesday in the journal Nature, researchers ...