• BY MICHAEL BALTER, SCIENCENOW (WIRED)
• 05.30.13
• 1:30 PM

Artist reconstruction of Aurornis xui. Image: Masato Hattori

During the Jurassic period, between about 200 million and 145 million years ago, some meat-eating dinosaurs began evolving birdlike skeletons and sprouting feathers on their bodies. One group of these creatures eventually split off to become birds, although researchers have long debated which one it was and when it actually happened. Now, a team of scientists claims to have found the earliest known bird, a discovery that could finally put these questions to rest. But critics question whether it really is a bird, and some are not entirely convinced that it’s an authentic specimen.

About30 species of feathered dinosaurs have been discovered in the past dozen years or so, mostly from geological formations in China’s northeastern Liaoning province. But up until now, few paleontologists have argued that any of them qualified as the earliest known bird. That honor has been held for 150 years by Archaeopteryx, a 150-million-year-old creature discovered in Germany, several well-preserved specimens of which have been found over the past century and a half. Nevertheless, two years ago, China’s most famous fossil hunter, Xing Xu of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, argued in a paper in Science thatArchaeopteryx was not really a bird, although many researchers did not agree.

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