11/13/2024

Small Fossil has Big Implications for Bird Brain Evolution

Piecing together how bird brains evolved has been a challenge

The birds of today descended from the dinosaurs of yore. Researchers have known relatively little, however, about how the bird's brain took shape over tens of millions of years.

"Birds are one of the most intelligent groups of living vertebrate animals," said Daniel Field, a vertebrate biologist at the University of Cambridge. "They really rival mammals in terms of their relative brain size and the complexity of their behaviors, social interactions [and] breeding displays."

Now, a newly discovered fossil provides the most complete glimpse to date of the brains of the ancestral birds that once flew above the dinosaurs. The species was named Navaornis hestiae, and it's described in the journal Nature.

Please select this link to read the complete article from NPR.