Not all early birds evolved toward better flight, Jurassic fossil suggests

Chinese Academy of Sciences Headquarters

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Photograph of the fossil skeleton of the new Jurassic bird, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, from China.

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Credit: Image by Min Wang.

For early birds, evolution wasn’t always about becoming better flyers. This conclusion is supported by the recent discovery of a remarkably well-preserved, 150-million-year-old bird fossil from Fujian Province, China, which is challenging long-held assumptions about early bird evolution.

A study published in Nature discusses the newly discovered species, Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, which lived during the Late Jurassic period (150–148 million years ago). The research suggests that the evolution of the avian body plan was not a straightforward progression toward improved flight capabilities, but a complex process involving the exploration of different ecological niches, including some that did not require flight.

Discovered in the recently recognized Zhenghe Fauna of southeastern China by researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the Fujian Institute of Geological Sciences, the crow-sized fossil represents the earliest known example of flight loss in the evolutionary history of birds.

Yuezhuornis challenges the traditional view that the avian body plan evolved almost exclusively under selective pressures associated with flight. Instead, it exhibits a striking mosaic of primitive and derived features, combining characteristic avian traits with features inherited from earlier dinosaur ancestors.

The fossil preserves closely packed, serrated teeth, which are typically found in deinonychosaurs but not birds. Most notably, Yuezhuornis possessed a hyperextensible second toe with a sickle-shaped claw, a characteristic feature of deinonychosaurs, including dromaeosaurids and troodontids.

“When we examined Yuezhuornis, we were struck by its extraordinary mix of features,” said Dr. WANG Min, corresponding author of the study. “It possesses bird-like pelvic and hindlimb structures yet retains the specialized predatory foot and teeth of a small meat-eating dinosaur. It shows us that early bird evolution was far more complicated than we previously realized.”

To determine where this enigmatic species fits on the evolutionary tree, the research team conducted comprehensive phylogenetic analyses using both maximum parsimony and Bayesian tip-dating methods.

“The results consistently placed Yuezhuornis firmly within Avialae (the group containing modern birds and their closest extinct relatives), just crownward of Archaeopteryx and as a sister taxon to Zhengheornis,” said Dr. ZHOU Zhonghe, a co-author of the study.

Given its unique anatomy, the team investigated the ecological niche of Yuezhuornis using ecomorphometric and multivariate statistical analyses. The analyses revealed that the limb proportions of Yuezhuornis were similar to those of living terrestrial birds and some non-avialan paravians, suggesting a terrestrial, flightless lifestyle and shedding new light on the ecological diversification of early-diverging avialans.

The discovery of a flightless, ground-dwelling bird from the Late Jurassic challenges the notion that aerodynamic selection was the dominant force shaping early avialan evolution. Instead, it suggests that some early birds followed evolutionary paths that did not favor flight, highlighting the remarkable ecological and morphological diversity that emerged during the early evolution of birds.

The ongoing discovery of early avialans also highlights the potential of the Zhenghe Fauna to shed light on a poorly documented stage of Jurassic bird evolution.

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Journal

Nature

DOI

10.1038/s41586-026-10972-z 

Life reconstruction of the Late Jurassic bird Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

Eco-morphometric disparity of Yuezhuornis and other Jurassic paravians. 

Evolutionary tree showing the position of Yuezhuornis as one of the earliest branching of birds. The right panes show the fore limb evolution across dinosaur-bird transition.

Credit

Image by Min Wang.

 

Why are there so many plants? Climate change is the important driver

The two warmest time periods on Earth in the past 140 million years drove both mass extinctions and explosions in plant diversity, according to researchers in Australia and Austria who say this could explain how flowering plants became dominant among land

University of Melbourne

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The two warmest time periods on Earth in the past 140 million years drove both mass extinctions and explosions in plant diversity, according to researchers in Australia and Austria who say this could explain how flowering plants became dominant among land plants. The study, published in Nature Plants, examined fossilised pollen and spores to show that the mid-Cretaceous and early Cenozoic periods of extreme global warmth were central to plant evolution. This applies not only to flowering plants, but also to the other main land plant groups.

Land plants are critical for life on land. The energy they capture from the sun underpins the existence of almost all terrestrial animals, fungi and bacteria. Lead author Kale Sniderman, Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne, said that flowering plants are the most productive and diverse groups of land plants with approximately 400,000 species globally.

"They dominate most ecosystems on land. They are the most important terrestrial players in capturing carbon dioxide from the air. They have evolved complex relationships with animals, fungi, and bacteria," Dr Sniderman said.

"This created vast numbers of species, each specialising in eating, pollinating, dispersing seed and decomposing flowering plants of different species or in different ways."

It’s not clear how flowering plants came to rule the world. In the middle of the Cretaceous Period, during ‘peak dinosaur’ time (~100 million years ago), flowering plants began to displace older plant groups that had dominated the land for 200 million years before. Climate may have been important in driving this transition, but until now a clear link between climate and plant diversity has been elusive due to bias in fossil records.

"The number of available fossils varies over geological time and between regions. Because of this, simple counts of fossilised species can give a misleading sense of diversity over evolutionary time," Dr Sniderman said.

The researchers compiled data of over 60,000 individual fossil occurrences, and applied methods that overcome the major biases in the fossil record. They then generated revised estimates of fossil pollen and spore diversity for successive time periods throughout the past 130 million years.

"Our research shows that both extinction and the emergence of new but evolutionarily related land plants occurred mostly during two intervals of globally extremely warm climate," said Greg Jordan, Professor of Botany at the University of Tasmania and a co-author of the study.

"Each of these extremely warm ‘turnover intervals’ lasted a few million years. Thus, the warmest greenhouse climates simultaneously destroyed and promoted plant diversity, but only when considered over million-year timescales."

"In contrast, cooler climates were marked by little change. Other potential causes of plant diversity trends, like interactions between plant groups, or geographic isolation (e.g., when Australia began moving away from the rest of the southern supercontinent, Gondwana) did not explain the plant diversity trends as much as the climate."

Dr Chris Mays, Curator of Palaeontology at the Natural History Museum of Vienna (Austria) and co-author of the study, says that current, human-driven warming is occurring much faster than the mid-Cretaceous and early Cenozoic time intervals.

"Human-driven warming is likely to cause plant extinctions much faster than those during the extreme warming events of the past, Dr Mays warns. “While extinct species will eventually be replaced by new species, not many of us will be satisfied having to wait the few million years for them to evolve, especially since we have the power to prevent the loss of species today, if we stop emitting CO₂ from burning fossil fuels."

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Journal

Nature Plants

DOI

10.1038/s41477-026-02429-y

Method of Research

Meta-analysis

 

Scientists discover ‘D-rex’, a giant fungus from Chinese forests whose unique lineage dates back 65 million years

‘Fungal giant’ with one of the tallest fruiting bodies known represents new family which arose soon after extinction of the dinosaurs

Frontiers

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Stromata of Dianjunus rex in the field. (a, c, d, f) Stromata attached to host roots. (b, e, g, h) Stromata around host plant. (a) Collectors. (i) Total weight of largest bilobedstromata.

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Credit: Song, Yan, Pérez-Moreno, Zhang, Yang, Xie, Su, Liu, Wang, Liu, Yang, Yang, Liu, Shi, Wan, Cheewangkoon, Dai, Senanayake and Yu

Deep in the forests of Yunnan, China, scientists have discovered a ‘fungal giant’ that challenges our understanding of how large fungi can become. The newly described species, Dianjunus rex, produces vertical fruiting bodies up to 50 cm high and weighing up to 2.2 kg – the largest known within the phylum Ascomycota.

“This remarkable species represents a new fungal family, Dianjunaceae, and provides a rare window into the evolution of extreme fungal body forms,” said Dr Indunil C Senanayake, an associate professor at the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species of the Kunming Institute of Botany in China and corresponding author of the new study, published in Frontiers in Fungal Biology.

“The discovery illustrates how much fungus biodiversity remains to be discovered in East Asian forests.”

During fieldwork in temperate coniferous forests near Damaidi and Yipinglang and in tropical rainforest near Nanbang, scientists from the Kunming Institute of Botany found large whitish fruiting bodies (‘stromata’) clearly belonging to an unknown ascomycete fungus. These grew on woody roots of Chinese cork oak, emerging from the rhizosphere. Ascomycetes, with more than 64,000 species the largest group of fungi, don’t grow true mushrooms but instead release spores from tiny, sac-like structures inside or on the surface of such fruiting bodies.

The scientists collected the fruiting bodies and deposited voucher specimens in the collections of the Kunming Institute of Botany. They grew spores on media to study the morphology of the fungus, and also sequenced its genome, including the ensemble of protein-coding genes.

A king among fungi

Genetic results confirmed by a detailed study of its morphology revealed that the fungus represented a new species, a new genus and even a new family (Dianjunaceae) within the order Xylariales. The authors named it Dianjunus rex, for its regal size and the ancient Dian kingdom. The closest known relative to ‘D-rex’ is Graphostroma platystoma, which grows on dead hardwood across the northern hemisphere and by itself forms the family Graphostromataceae.

Xylariales are famous for their production of secondary compounds as well as enzymes which can degrade complex plant molecules. Such enzymes might likewise help ‘D-rex’ to digest dead wood.

Evolutionary origin shortly after dinosaur armageddon

From a ‘molecular clock’ analysis of the new species’ DNA, while comparing it to the genome of hundreds of fungi with known evolutionary age, the authors were able to estimate that the Dianjunaceae arose around 65 million years ago. Strikingly, this is only one million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene mass extinction event – famous for wiping out the dinosaurs besides countless other animals and plants.

“This timing raises an intriguing possibility. After the mass extinction, forests experienced dramatic changes, including the sudden availability of large amounts of dead plant material,” said Senanayake. “For wood-associated decomposing fungi, such environmental disruption may have created new ecological opportunities.”

Why does ‘D-rex’ grow so uncommonly big? Until now, the record-holders among ascomycete fruiting bodies measured 20 to 30 cm tall.

“A fruiting body which towers above surrounding vegetation and debris could have better dispersal of spores by wind in dense forests. However, such a large structure requires substantial energy investment, suggesting that this strategy likely evolved only where the ecological benefits outweighed the costs,” hypothesized Senanayake.

The researchers predicted that more discoveries of fungi from subtropical China lie in store.

“This region combines exceptional habitat heterogeneity, climatic stability, and complex biotic interactions that promote fungal diversification. Historically, however, fungal diversity in these ecosystems has been underestimated due to logistical difficulties in field sampling, the seasonal and cryptic nature of fungal fruiting, and a historical emphasis on economically important fungi,” said Senanayake.

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Journal

Frontiers in Fungal Biology

DOI

10.3389/ffunb.2026.1940464

Method of Research

Experimental study

Subject of Research

Not applicable

Article Title

Unearthing a fungal giant: Dianjunaceae fam. nov., a novel Paleocene lineage of Xylariales harboring Dianjunus rex gen. et sp. nov

Hikers Spotted 3 Stranded ‘Dinosaur Fish’ In A Michigan River, And Rescuers Found 27

Ashley Driggs
Sun, October 11, 2026 
A-Z Animals.

On Aug. 23, hikers on the North Country Trail crossed Michigan's West Branch Ontonagon River, downstream of Victoria Dam, and noticed three large fish stuck in a shallow, cut-off pool. They called the Michigan DNR's Report All Poaching hotline. That one call set off three separate rescue missions, and by the time crews finished, they had pulled 27 lake sturgeon, fish so old-looking that people sometimes call them "dinosaur fish," out of water that was about to run dry.

Lake sturgeon first show up in the fossil record from 100 million to 150 million years ago, according to the Michigan DNR. This particular group was stuck in a part of the river that barely flows for much of the year, and the reason traces back to a dam.
How the Rescue Grew From Two Fish to 27

DNR fisheries technicians Kyle Urban and Jack Cole were first on scene and found two sturgeon in the pool the hikers had reported. They carried the fish nearly a mile over rough ground to reach flowing water, keeping the sturgeon's gills underwater in hiking bags the whole way.

A second mission, run with the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community and the Upper Peninsula Power Company, moved ten more fish. A third brought in extra staff and equipment, and crews found roughly two dozen more sturgeon swimming in a murky, disconnected pool nearby. In total, 27 fish were moved to safety, including one measuring 55 inches. None of the rescued sturgeon were older than 28, though the species can live well past 100.

Why Losing These Fish Would Have Hurt a Recovering Population

Lake sturgeon have been listed as a threatened species in Michigan since 1994, and the state has stocked young sturgeon in the Ontonagon River since 1998 to help rebuild the population there. They are also slow to reproduce: males typically need around 15 years to mature, and females need 20 to 25, according to Michigan Sea Grant.

Because the Ontonagon population is still recovering, the DNR said losing all 27 fish would have been "extremely detrimental." Every adult that survives to spawning age matters more in a population this small.

What Caused the Low Water, and What the State Is Changing

Victoria Dam is run by the Upper Peninsula Power Company, which operates under a federal license to generate hydroelectric power. Under that license, water is pulled from this stretch of the river and piped to a powerhouse downstream, rejoining the river later. That leaves the channel between the dam and the powerhouse with little or no flow for parts of the year, including the section where the sturgeon were trapped, according to the DNR.

As crews worked out how to reach the rest of the fish, the power company released extra water into the channel, within what its permit allows, to buy the remaining sturgeon more room to move. The DNR is now reviewing historical flow and temperature data and looking at extra surveys with its partners, aiming to catch stranded fish earlier next time.

"We can't be everywhere at once," said Cory Kovacs, manager of the DNR's Lake Superior unit. The agency credited the hikers directly: without that one report, the rescue would never have started.

Fossils’ Fuel: How Dinosaurs Became Big Business

Norman Vanamee
September 24, 2026 

Above: Cassandra Hatton, head of Sotheby's Science & Natural History Department.

"Bones, bones, bones, my phone is full of pictures of bones." Cassandra Hatton is sitting at a table in the Breuer Building, Sotheby's new auction and gallery space in New York City, holding up her iPhone. The photos arrive at all hours, she says. At the other end of the exchange, inevitably, is a professional fossil hunter who has just come across a tooth or vertebra sticking out of the dirt somewhere in the American west. "Usually I reply, 'Let me know when you find two bones. Or three.' But sometimes I write, 'Okay, this would be something I'd be interested in selling for you. Strap on your GoPro.' "

Hatton is the head of Sotheby's Science & Natural History Department, and over the past few years she has been responsible for a series of record-breaking auctions of dinosaur fossils. In July it was a 67-million-year-old tyrannosaurus rex nicknamed Gus, which was sold to an anonymous buyer for $50.1 million, the most ever paid for dinosaur remains. Apex, a stegosaurus, set the previous world record when it went to Ken Griffin, the hedge fund manager, for $44.6 million in 2024. In 2022 it was Maximus, a T. rex skull, which sold for $6 million to an anonymous buyer.

The reply that Hatton's fossil hunters would like to receive: "I'll be on the next flight." That's because serious interest from Sotheby's, or any major auction house, means they can more easily secure funding for a dig, which can take years and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And, more important, it means they'll be able to start negotiating with the landowner to split the profits from a sale (commercial paleontologists can dig only on private property in the U.S.). "A lot of people know exactly what I need," Hatton says. "But if I haven't worked with them before, it's a master class in what I have to have to be able to sell things." That includes quarry maps: precise 3D renderings of the fossil in its surroundings. The more complete the documentation, she says, the more valuable the specimen.

A T. rex nicknamed Gus, which was discovered in Harding County, South Dakota, sold at auction in July for $50.1 million.Matthew Sherman/Courtesy Sotheby's · Matthew Sherman/Courtesy Sotheby's

Dinosaurs became big business for auction houses in the late 1990s, when Sotheby's sold Sue, a T. rex, for $8.5 million. That dinosaur had been at the center of a lengthy and public ownership battle that began when the FBI seized it from a commercial paleontologist who had dug it up from a privately owned cattle ranch on the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation near Faith, South Dakota. The feds claimed it was the property of the U.S. government; the paleontologist said they had paid the rancher $5,000 and therefore it was theirs; the rancher said he had never signed a contract to transfer ownership. Ultimately, a federal judge ruled that fossil remains are the property of whoever owns the land on which they are found. The rancher, who indeed had not signed a contract, called Sotheby's.


Sue was purchased by the Field Museum in Chicago, which solicited money from a consortium of donors to buy the fossil. Despite the generous gift, the spectacle around the sale and the high final price alarmed prominent scientists and museum heads. Having dinosaur skeletons become mere auction trophies for the ultrarich would be terrible for scientific research, they argued, especially if buyers locked them up in private collections. Commercial paleontologists and auctioneers countered that if it weren't for them, many dinosaurs would never be found or would be lost to erosion.

Hatton points out that many private buyers end up giving or lending their dinosaurs to museums, which is why, she says, it's so vital that anyone working in the field follow strict protocols. "I've been very lucky that there have been academics who have given me guidance. I ask them, 'What kind of restoration techniques do you not agree with? What kind of mounting techniques do you not like? What documentation do you need?' Because I want to make sure that whatever I'm selling could go into a museum."


Hatton is working on a potential auction for this fall, the details of which have not been made public. In recent years T. rexes have inspired the biggest bidding wars, but Hatton says she's interested in bringing other things to market. "The more I diversify the types of dinosaurs sold, the more data points we have. It's important to know what the best example of a species is worth." The way to do that is to have eight or so parties bid on it at auction. "And then you can kind of price things from there."

Photo credit: Getty Images

A bidding war broke out at Christie's in 2020 for Stan, a T. rex, which sold for a record $31.8 million to Abu Dhabi's natural history museum.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Hedge-funder Ken Griffin bought a nearly complete stegosaurus
(254 out of 319 bones) for $44.6 million at Sotheby's in 2024.

Photo credit: Courtesy Sotheby's

In July an anonymous buyer nabbed Gus, one of the largest T. rexes ever discovered, for a record-breaking $50.1 million at Sotheby's.

This story appears in the October 2026 issue of Town & Country.

Dinos snacked on seafood washed up on ancient beaches, fossil study shows

Dinos and their prey likely ate seaweeds, which offers an explanation to mysteriously high carbon isotope signatures in their teeth

Frontiers

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Five specimens from the Cloverly Formation assemblage after destructive sampling for isotopic composition and laser ablation analysis. The specimens from left to right are three specimens of crocodilian teeth, the fourth tooth is a Deinonychus antirrhopus tooth, and, finally, on the far right is a Sauropelta edwardsi tooth. The specimens are mounted on adhesive putty attached to a glass slide with specimen labels below them.

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Credit: Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History/Clayton Forster.

Storms routinely wash marine matter ashore, which land-living animals and other organisms exploit as food sources. This is known as marine subsidization (MS). Today, MS is particularly common in coastal ecosystems and is enhanced among animals when land ecosystems yield less food than usual, for example during droughts. A new Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution study has shown that dinos and their prey, too, may have indulged in seafood washed onto beaches.

“We show that coastal terrestrial organisms in the greenhouse climates of the Cretaceous relied on marine resources to supplement their diets in a similar way that modern organisms do,” said first author Dr Clayton Forster, a geologist at the University of Arkansas. “We can identify that marine resources are passed along the food chain and incorporated in the minerals of bones and teeth of dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles, and fish.”

Mystery teeth

Plants contain ‘light’ (C-12) and ‘heavy’ (C-13) carbon isotopes. The ratio of these isotopes, expressed as δ13C, is a chemical ‘fingerprint’ that gets passed from food into the body of the consumer. When an animal eats, the δ13C value is incorporated into its tooth enamel with an upward shift in the δ13C value to a value higher than that of its food. This difference is between 11 and 13 parts per thousand in the tooth enamel of living animals.

In dino teeth, however, this difference has been found to be consistently higher, creating a mystery around carbon signatures of dino teeth. Their δ13C values were also higher than expected for animals that solely eat land-growing plants, which have lower δ13C values than most marine plants. If dinos or their prey snacked on marine matter, however, it could explain this discrepancy.

“By determining the carbon isotope composition of dinosaur, fish, and crocodile tooth enamel, we can determine what their primary dietary source was and if they were different between regions,” explained Forster.

To do so, the researchers used fossils from (once) coastal sites along the Western Interior Seaway – a vast inland sea that split North America into two landmasses around 100 million years ago – and the ancient Gulf of Mexico coastline. They also included fossils from land-locked sites. These sites formed during the early Albian (around 113-107 million years ago) or early Cenomanian (approximately 100-96 million years ago). The team used powder from these fossils to analyze isotopic composition during both ages and determined the latitudes on which the organisms lived.

The analyses showed that the δ13C value in fossils from coastal sites was not only higher than that from the land-locked formation, but also was consistent between coastal sites, regardless of latitude or age. The study is the first to identify MS in prehistoric ecosystems.

Suspect: seaweed

“Coastal-dwelling organisms must have eaten some kind of organic matter from the ocean, or prey that had done so. This pattern is shared from fish to megaherbivores and indicates that the extra carbon source must have been low in the food-chain to affect both aquatic and terrestrial animals,” Forster explained. The source also must have been an organism living in coastal, but not inland, habitats and remained available over many millions of years.

“Few organisms meet these criteria besides marine macroalgae or macrophytes – seaweeds,” said Forster. “Given the almost ubiquitous behavior of large coastal herbivores today to supplement their diet with seaweeds, it’s likely that most of the sampled herbivorous dinosaurs were no different.”

But not all dinos exploited marine resources. Tenontosaurus tilletti, a large herbivorous dinosaur found in many locations throughout the Cretaceous, for example, did not use marine sources for food. Its δ13C value was found to be similar to that of animals which are alive today and consume land-growing plants. Therefore, higher δ13C values likely reflect dietary preferences rather than geological processes that changed chemical traces in tooth enamel after animals died.

While the dataset clearly demonstrates MS in the coastal deposits the researchers examined, it lacks data from polar and equatorial latitudes during the early Albian and early Cenomanian. Future research needs to determine whether MS was common in different latitudes and time periods such as the preceding Jurassic Period or the subsequent early Cenozoic Era.

“Our study emphasizes the connections between terrestrial and marine ecosystems,” concluded Forster. “They are deeply intertwined and have been for hundreds of millions of years. It highlights the importance of environmental linkages across time and space and protecting them where they exist today.”

A large crocodilian tooth from the Wayan Formation. The specimen is shown next to a centimeter ruler in a specimen box on top of its specimen information card.

Credit

Idaho Museum of Natural History/Clayton Forster.

Theropod tooth from the Mussentuchit Member assemblage on a foam block next to a scale card.

Credit

North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences/Clayton Forster.

A Tenontosaurus tilletti tooth from the Cloverly Formation assemblage in a glass sample vial.

Credit

Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History/Clayton Forster.

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Journal

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution

DOI

10.3389/fevo.2026.1895247

Method of Research

Experimental study

Article Title

Marine Subsidization of Dinosaurian Ecosystems