Among living vertebrates, birds and some squamous skulls have evolved unique mobility functions, which is one of the key factors for birds to evolve into the most diverse terrestrial vertebrates.
So, how did bird skulls evolve mobility functions?
On December 7, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Institute of Paleontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) announced that Wang Min, Thomas, Zhou Zhonghe and their collaborators recently passed the 120 million-year-old Mesozoic anti-bird The high-precision three-dimensional scanning and restoration of the skull fossils of the Ya-tailed Glyphus revealed that the skulls of Mesozoic birds retained a large number of original features of archosaurs, showing a modular evolution.
The important results of this study on the evolution of early bird skulls were recently published in the Nature Index journal "Electronic Journal-Life Science" (eLife).
Researcher Wang Min, the first author and corresponding author of the paper, provided a popular science video to demonstrate the high-precision three-dimensional scanning and restoration of the 120 million-year-old Mesozoic anti-avinivian genus skull fossil.
(Reporter Sun Zifa produced Liu Peng's video source from Institute of Paleospine, Chinese Academy of Sciences)
Responsible editor: [Ye Pan]