It had feathers and wings, so it was clearly a bird — but it sported a long tail and sharp claws, which seemed reptilian. A smattering of other feathery Jurassic fossils, including those known ...

Scientists discovered two Jurassic bird fossils in China, pushing back bird diversification by 20 million years. One, ...

Jurassic bird fossil discovery of a species named Baminornis zhenghensis pushes bird evolution timeline back 20 million years.

Biologists previously believed modern birds had evolved 20 million years later than the new evidence suggests.

Birds are breathing in high levels of airborne microplastics into their lungs—and, likely, so are we, with unclear effects on ...

Scientists uncovered a 149-million-year-old bird fossil in southeastern China with unexpectedly modern traits they believe could rewrite the evolutionary history of birds.

The early evolution of birds has long been a mystery due to the limited ... Most remarkably, Baminornis had a short tail ending in a pygostyle – a fused bone also found in modern birds.

While this species is sometimes described as the first bird, other scientists would describe it as bird-like. Archaeopteryx’s long, bony tail is one of the features that show it comes very early in ...

Bird — or birdlike — fossils from the Jurassic period are relatively rare and often incomplete. Despite Archaeopteryx’s feathered wings, it closely resembled non-avialan dinosaurs, notably due to its ...

notably due to its distinctive long, reptilian tail—a stark contrast to the short-tailed morphology of modern and Cretaceous birds. Recent studies have questioned the avialan status of ...

Wang: A fossil’s age is always later than the species’ actual origin. To estimate evolutionary timelines, scientists construct phylogenetic trees — a “Tree of Life” that maps species’ relationships ...