Fossil ‘overturns more than a century of knowledge about origin of modern birds’

Janavis fossil block (Juan Benito and Daniel Field/University of Cambridge)

Fragments of a skeleton fossil hidden in a rock the size of a grapefruit have helped overturn more than a century of knowledge about the origin of modern birds, researchers say.

A new study found that one of the key skull features that characterises 99% of modern birds – a mobile beak – evolved before the mass extinction event that killed all large dinosaurs, 66 million years ago.