Time to dig up another fossil. It’s a bird, but it has no connection to the sabre-toothed kitty cat I posted yesterday — this is a 80 million year old bird, Navaornis hestiae, written up in a Nature article, Cretaceous bird from Brazil informs the evolution of the avian skull and brain. It looks like a real bird to me.
a,b, Photograph (a) and interpretive drawing (b) of the exposed side of the holotype of N. hestiae (MPM-200-1) in left lateral view. c, Micro-computed tomography rendering of MPM-200-1 in right ventral–lateral view. Scale bar, 10 mm.
It has a fairly big brain, with some differences in structure from modern birds — it has a smaller motor control area, so while it had the capacity for complex behavior, it may not have been as agile in the air as birds today. It’s intermediate in brain complexity between Archaeopteryx and extant birds.
a, Three-dimensional reconstruction of the endocranial morphology of N. hestiae from MPM-200-1 and MPM-334-1. Portions deriving from MPM-200-1 and MPM-334-1, as well as the reconstruction process, are explained in the Methods and Extended Data Fig. 7. b, Evolution of endocranial morphology across Pennaraptora. Numbers in the coloured boxes refer to the degree of expansion of each of the main neuroanatomical and sensorial regions for each taxon. Brown arrows in b depict the orientation of the foramen magnum.
Cambridge invested a bit in publicizing this discovery, with a nice fancy video.
Why has evolution not tried a sabre-toothed bird?
One of the things I really love about Archeopteryx is that it had the feathers of a bird, and how, but also the skeleton of a predatory dinosaur. Talk about intermediate fossils! Creatiionists have to talk about Archeopteryx, because even their audience has heard of it. But they never mention its skeleton.
Archaeopteryx also had jaws with teeth and a long reptilian like tail.
A lot of the early birds had teeth.