This is bird note.

In 2018, when paleontologist Daniel Field was researching the evolution of birds,

he examined some previously overlooked fossil specimens from the end of the age of dinosaurs.

The fossils were discovered in the year 2000 by an amateur fossil collector from the Netherlands

named Martin Van Dinther.

Basically, we had a very unimpressive looking rock

with a couple of bones poking out,

but they looked like they were probably bird bones.

So we wanted to try to peer inside the rock to see if there was anything on the inside.

He set aside his chisel for this delicate work. Daniel and his team used micro CT scanning, kind of like a high energy cat scan, letting them visualize

the encased fossils in detail without the risk of damaging them.

And when we did that with this particular specimen, we were absolutely amazed to see that concealed

completely within the rock was a near complete three-dimensional preserved skull of a small bird from the end of the age of dinosaurs.

And this just completely blew our minds because a complete skull of an early modern bird from the end of the age of dinosaurs had never been seen before.

All of the giant dinosaurs went extinct about 66.02 million years ago when an enormous asteroid struck the Earth and caused one of the largest mass extinction events in the history of our planet. And this fossil is somewhere around 66.7 million years old,

which means that this animal was alive in what you can think of as a geological blink of an eye before the

asteroid impact. It provides us with a spectacular lens into what birds were like just before the asteroid impact that wiped out the giant dinosaurs.

This is the earliest known fossil record of a modern bird, distinct from bird-like dinosaurs,

with features like a toothless beak and fused foot bones.

The skull is small, a little under two inches long, so it wasn't a large bird.

And comparing the fossil to modern birds reveal something really interesting.

The front of the skull looks very much like the skull of a small chicken-like bird like a

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