One of the links to our distant past is the discovery of fossils. The more intact these fossils are, the more we come to discover the truths of the ancient lives of creatures we unearth.
Fossils are abundant in many scientific communities. But a singular problem is that many are not usually in one piece. Therefore, unraveling scientific information derived from fossils is a slow and laborious process dependent on careful handling with the realization that what is unearthed might be an important key.
In 2016, a bird fossil was found in Brazil by William Nava, a director of a nearby museum. Nava had earlier discovered the site in 2004 and was actively persuing its secrets. The fossil find was a rarity, unique in that it was a complete bird skeleton from some 80 million years ago. But it wasn’t until 2022 when Professor Daniel J. Field, a vertebrate paleontologist, realized that the skull was undamaged and completely intact. This has given the scientists a rare opportunity to study the complete brain and skull structure of the specimen.
The fossil is so important that it may give scientists a deeper understanding of how the brains of modern birds have evolved, using the discovery as a “Rosetta Stone.” The avian brain and its evolution of intelligence is a long-standing mystery waiting to be solved. With this unbroken skeleton and its intact skull, science will be making extraordinary headways into this field. Scientists say that this fossil fills in an extraordinary time frame.
A Historic Bird Brain
The brain of the fossilized bird was digitally reconstructed to allow for accurate 3D rendering using advanced micro-CT scanning. This technology has provided a complex and detailed rendering of the skull and brain that will give researchers more than enough material to work with for decades. From the original bird-like dinosaur, which lived some 150 million years ago, to the birds of today, this fossil helps bridge a gap that has long been a black hole of understanding. It will fill in some 70 million years of probabilities, all ready to be uncovered and processed.
The new species is now officially known as Navaornis hestiae. Its cerebrum was larger than that of the earlier bird-like dinosaurs. That means the bird likely had greater cognitive ability than dinosaurs had. However, most areas of the brain were less developed than that of today’s birds, giving rise to the belief that flight was not the best quality of the discovered bird. This doesn’t mean that flight was not possible. It suggests that today’s birds have evolved to highly complex flight mechanics, more suitable than those of the bird of the fossil. There is ongoing hope that more fossils like this will be discovered and studied.
You can dive in a bit further with this abstract from the science journal, Nature. A four-minute Cambridge University YouTube video encapsulates the findings.