Darwinian theories have been disproven time and time again, but, like with everything, there is an exception to the rule and that is the Archaeopteryx fossil. Discovered over 160 years ago, this specimen is the link between ancient dinosaurs and modern birds and has been helping scientist discover how birds started to fly for decades now.
We now have more than one of these creatures under study, but the one that has yielded the most amount of information is the “Chicago Archaeopteryx,” which has been once again dusted off and studied by researchers from the Field Museum, and their findings have been fascinating. You can read all about them, in the journal Nature, but here are some fun highlights.
The Archaeopteryx fossil, one of the most fascinating creatures ever discovered
The so called “Chicago Archaeopteryx” is the smallest of its kind ever found, only about the size of a pigeon, and it is also the most complete to date. Despite its name, it was found in the Solnhofen limestone of Germany and was kept in a private collection since its discovery until 1990, when it entered the museum spheres.
The Field Museum was able to get a chance to house it and study it in 2022, which was a unique and exciting opportunity, as Jingmai O’Connor, the Field Museum’s associate curator of fossil reptiles and lead author of the paper gushed.
“When we first got our Archaeopteryx, I was like, this is very, very, very cool, and I was beyond excited. But at the same time, Archaeopteryx has been known for over 160 years, so I wasn’t sure what new things we would be able to learn. Our specimen is so well-preserved and so well-prepared that we’re actually learning a ton of new information, from the tip of its snout to the tip of its tail.”
The problem with this specimen is that it is embedded in rock and the color of the bones and the soft tissue is almost the same as the rock’s which makes it hard to study and “separate”. But new technology came to the rescue, and the team was able to use UV light to avoid damaging delicate soft tissues and used CT scans to guide their work.
As O’Connor explained “A CT scanner is essentially a machine that takes a series of X-rays, which it uses to build a three-dimensional image, based on differences in density. It lets you see inside things. CT scanning was very important for our preparation process – it let us know things like, the bone is exactly 3.2 millimeters (0.1 inches) below the surface of the rock, which let us know exactly how far we could go before we would hit the bone.”
The UV lighting was equally important. “Previous studies have shown that there’s something in the chemical composition of Solnhofen fossils that makes the soft tissues fluoresce, or glow under UV light. So, our amazing prep team utilized UV light periodically through the preparation process to make sure that they weren’t accidentally removing any soft tissues that you can’t see with the naked eye.”
And the discoveries were groundbreaking, especially considering the amount of questions that had been posed about this specimen. O’Connor continues, telling us all they learned “The bones in the roof of the mouth help us learn about the evolution of something called cranial kinesis – a feature in modern birds that lets the beak move independently from the braincase.”
While this might not be as interesting to the public, the discovery holds significance for researchers focused on avian evolution. There is a prevailing theory that adaptations in skull structure, tailored to various environmental roles, played a role in the diversification of bird species into the thousands we see now and evidence from well-preserved soft tissue in the limbs points to a lifestyle that included terrestrial movement and possibly some tree-climbing behavior.