Tip of the toupee to boingboing for promoting this phenomenal work.

Roadrunner showing off his zygodactyl foot
From Wikipedia

After spending a decade in New Mexico, it is easy to develop an affinity towards roadrunners. Geococcyx californianus is our official State Bird, after all, and its legendary affinity to asphalt-based habitats ensure that most New Mexicans with a xeriscaped yard (or view overlooking a parking lot) can appreciate its cursorial, lizard-hunting habits. So it was with great interest that I read of a recent report of a fossil trackway that suggests a roadrunner-like bird lived alongside dinosaurs in China nearly 120,000,000 years ago.

Today’s roadrunners are specialized, ground-dwelling cuckoos. They inherited from their arboreal ancestors a condition known as zygodactyly, meaning their fourth toe has rotated clockwise to point more-or-less backwards, joining toe #1 in opposing the second and third pedal digits. (Unfortunately, the most famous representatives of the cuckoo family do not display this characteristic feature.) This foot type, which evolved independently in cuckoos, parrots, woodpeckers, and owls, gives roadrunners a distinct, X-shaped footprint, as seen in the roadrunner trackway to the right.

A team of researchers has identified a similar, zygodactyl trackway preserved in Early Cretaceous rocks from Shangdong, China. The tracks, named Shangdongornipes muxiai, appear to have been made by a roadrunner-sized bird as it ran across wet ground sometime between 110 and 120 million years ago. The rocks that preserve the Shandongornipes trackway also contain tracks made by ornithopod and theropod dinosaurs, including relatively rare tracks made by sickle-clawed dromaeosaur (“raptor”) dinosaurs.

Despite the overall similarities, the Shangdongornipes tracks were most certainly not made by roadrunners. Although roadrunners are the only modern birds capable of making similar tracks, roadrunners are only known from the American Southwest, and their fossil record only goes back to the Late Pleistocene—a couple of million years ago, at best. As previously mentioned, zygodactyly is known from a handful of different types of modern birds, but their oldest fossils show up after the Age of Dinosaurs, at most 65 million years ago. The Shangdongornipes tracks are almost twice as old, and show that some group of birds, so far unknown from fossil bones, had developed a zygodactyl foot long before any modern groups, and were experimenting with the roadrunner lifestyle over a hundred million years before today’s roadrunners first evolved.

Further reading:

Lockley, M. G., Li, R., Harris, J. D., Matsukawa, M. and Liu, M. 2007. Earliest zygodactyl bird feet: evidence from Early Cretaceous roadrunner-like tracks. Naturwissenschaften Published online: 27 March 2007. doi:10.1007/s00114-007-0239-x.

El PaleoFreak has the story with a “reconstruction” of the trackmaker.

Tip of the Hairy Museum toupee to Jerry Harris for bringing this story to my attention.

Evon Zerbetz putting the feathery finishing touches
on Raucous! Everything Raven at the NMMNHS.

The exhibit is centered around dozens of Zerbetz’s colored linocut prints, depicting ravens in all their playful glory—collecting ‘bling,’ taunting dogs, performing on clotheslines, or just perched on a branch and kawing to their heart’s content. Other highlights include a life-sized raven’s nest, raven-based games, and a Raven Radio broadcasting bird-based music and news from ‘roving-raven reporters.’

Over the past seven days, Evon and a team of NMMNHS staff and volunteers have transformed the museum’s changing exhibit space into a raven-ous wonderland. We painted the multicolored walls with large graphics based on Evon’s linocuts, and set up the space for the many family events going on this weekend. In addition, we added a little side display highlighting the members of the family Corvidae (ravens, crows, magpies, and jays) known from New Mexico.

Check out the museum’s website for more information on the exhibit and activities, and Evon’s website for more information about her and her work. Raucous! Everything Raven is on display through April 22nd in the first floor changing exhibits gallery at the NMMNHS.

The little dromaeosaur Microraptor gui sported long flight feathers on both its arms and legs. When first described, it was reconstructed as a sort of dinosaurian flying squirrel, with limbs outstretched in order to maximize lift and glide from tree to tree. A new study by Sankar Chatterjee and R. Jack Templin (published online today) proposes a different flight profile. They propose that if Microraptor tucked its legs up in a more dinosaur-/bird-like fashion, then its leg feathers would have splayed out horizontally—below and somewhat behind the wings on its forelimbs.

If this interpretation is correct, then Microraptor would have been the Mesozoic equivalent of a biplane—maybe not quite so advanced as tyrannosaurs in F-14s, but pretty nifty nonetheless.

Further reading:

Chatterjee, S. and Templin, J. R. 2007. Biplane wing planform and flight performance of the feathered dinosaur Microraptor gui. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Published online DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0609975104. PDF.

Story in The Guardian.

Update 1/25:

More comprehensive Microraptor posts are up at Living the Scientific Life and microecos.

But I think this fossil is most noteworthy because it shows the earliest record of a relatively advanced avian behavior—this specimen is clearly preserved doing the “funky chicken”:

In my opinion, this loosening up of Archie’s image is a welcome change from earlier Archaeopteryx fossils, which have been found in a more dramatic, “forsaken” pose:

A more scientific skeletal reconstruction of the new specimen has been made by Scott Hartman.

His gallery over at DeviantArt is noteworthy for several sharp paleo-images and a step by step guide to his reconstruction of the skeleton of Coelurus.