Fossil named 'Attenborough's strange bird' was the first of its kind without teeth
Originally published by Field Museum, on March 5, 2024 Illustration showing the fossil skeleton of Imparavis Attenborough , alongside a reconstruction of the bird in life. Credit: Ville Sinkkonen. No birds alive today have teeth. But that wasn't always the case; many early fossil birds had beaks full of sharp, tiny teeth . In a paper in the journal Cretaceous Research , scientists have described a new species of fossil bird that was the first of its kind to evolve toothlessness ; its name, in honor of naturalist Sir David Attenborough, means " Attenborough's strange bird ." "It is a great honor to have one's name attached to a fossil, particularly one as spectacular and important as this. It seems the history of birds is more complex than we knew," says Sir David Attenborough. All birds are dinosaurs , but not all dinosaurs fall into the specialized type of dinosaurs known as birds, sort of like how all squares are rectangles, but not all rectang...