A new bird fossil helps scientists better understand convergent evolution of complex anatomy and provides new insights into the evolution of face and beak shape in a forerunner of modern birds.

If you wanted to know what the first bird beak looked like, today's your lucky day. The Ichthyornis dispar was the subject of a paper published this week. Ichthyornis dispar is the name of a creature ...

Every day, scientists uncover startling new information that reshapes our understanding of the ancient world. The latest groundbreaking discovery concerns a bird from the late Cretaceous period with a ...

Confuciusornis was a crow-like fossil bird that lived in the Cretaceous ~120 million years ago. It was one of the first birds to evolve a beak (Fig. 1). Early beak evolution remains understudied.

Scientists have successfully replicated the molecular processes that led from dinosaur snouts to the first bird beaks. Using the fossil record as a guide, a research team led by Yale paleontologist ...

Scientists said the bird, called Falcatakely forsterae, possessed a face unlike any other known bird from the age of dinosaurs. A delicate but exquisitely preserved skull of a crow-sized bird with a ...

Michael Hanson/ Yale University One of the fragments of Ichthyornis dispar skull the researchers examined for this study was found over a century ago, but scientists hadn’t put together the pieces of ...

Scientists at Yale have pieced together what they think is the first bird beak ever to have evolved. It belongs to Ichthyornis dispar, which lived in North America nearly 100 million years ago. It's ...

Over the years, scientists have learned about literally thousands of different bird species, and each one sports a distinctive beak shape. But why do bird beaks come in so many different shapes and ...

Given the unusual attention granted to turkeys this week, let’s talk dinosaurs. Today’s birds are, of course, descendants of the only branch of the dino tree that made it through the end-Cretaceous ...

Confuciusornis was a crow-like fossil bird that lived in the Cretaceous ~120 million years ago. It was one of the first birds to evolve a beak. Early beak evolution remains understudied. Using an ...

Scientists have successfully replicated the molecular processes that led from dinosaur snouts to the first bird beaks. Just don’t call them dino-chickens. “Our goal here was to understand the ...