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Artist’s reconstruction of Janavis finalidens, a very large marine bird from the late Cretaceous

Ancient bird with a movable beak rewrites the story of avian evolution

30 November 2022

A skull bone from 67 million years ago reveals that ancestors of modern birds had jointed beaks, not immobile ones as biologists have long thought

Tiny bird-like dinosaur discovered in amber might actually be a lizard

1 April 2020

A 99-million-year-old skull recently discovered in amber might actually belong to a lizard, rather than a tiny bird-like dinosaur as first thought

Heracles inexpectatus lived in New Zealand

World’s largest parrot was a metre tall and lived 19 million years ago

6 August 2019

Palaeontologists working in New Zealand have discovered the first evidence of giant parrots, which they believe weighed 7 kilograms and lived 19 million years ago

Flightless bird three times the size of an ostrich used to roam Europe

27 June 2019

A huge flightless bird called Pachystruthio dmanisensis lived in eastern Europe 1.8 million years ago, just when hominins first entered the continent from Africa

Working hypothesis: from buzzwords to Amazon workers

29 May 2019

Sorting the week's supernovae from the absolute zeros

The evolution of Archaeopteryx is stranger than anyone imagined

29 May 2019

Winged Jurassic dinosaur Archaeopteryx was more than just an early ancestor of birds – fossils reveal it was an evolutionary wonder akin to Darwin's finches

We kill 60 billion chickens a year, and their bones get preserved by landfill

When humans are wiped from Earth, the chicken bones will remain

12 December 2018

When humans have vanished from Earth, one of the most enduring marks of our impact will be the sudden appearance of copious chicken bones in the fossil record

Dinosaur fossil may be a whole new species of the first birds

24 October 2018

A fossil of the dinosaur Archaeopteryx is so unlike any other specimens that it belongs to a new species – and could confirm that the animals were early birds

Geese-like birds seem to have survived the dinosaur extinction

23 October 2017

A bird group named the Vegaviidae, which resembled modern loons and geese, is the first identified with members that lived before and after the Cretaceous extinction