Archaeopteryx: The World’s Most Famous Bird

okay good morning everyone and welcome to the 2019 Royal Tyrrell Museum speaker series today the Royal Tyrrell Museum in its cooperating Society are pleased to welcome back a regular guest of the speaker series dr. John node John is a petroleum geologist based in Calgary working for grant ierra energy John obtained his undergraduate degree from Imperial College in London England after working as a mining geologist in South Africa and as a marine geologist planning undersea cable route for British Telecom companies in the UK John completed a master's degree in sedimentology with his thesis focusing on the floovio sequence or geography of dinosaur Provincial Park upon completing his thesis John returned to the University of London to pursue his PhD on the sedimentary evolution of Eastern Borneo after completing his PhD John was lured by oil companies and over the years has worked on a variety of Middle Eastern and Canadian exploration projects he has worked for a variety of oil companies over the years and through it all John has always been and remains to this day a real paleontology enthusiast today John will present a talk on the most famous of all fossil Birds Archaeopteryx so without further delay I present to you dr. John node [Applause] well good morning everybody today I'm going to talk to you about Archaeopteryx and I hope that most of you are familiar with this bird it's probably the most famous bird in the world and the reason for this is that when it was discovered back in the 1860s it was the fossil bird that came from the Jurassic period which was way earlier than any other fossil bird material that had ever been discovered so this is a picture of the Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx which I have down here as well I brought in to show you this specimen now obviously this is not the real one otherwise it would be worth probably around a hundred million dollars or so but this is to give you an idea of the size of this animal but the first body specimen that was found of Archaeopteryx was back in 1861 and it was named Archaeopteryx which means old wing and you can see very clearly why that is but these beautiful wings that have been preserved on this specimen here the Berlin specimen it lived around 150 million years ago in the Late Jurassic in southern Germany and this was at the same time as various other famous fossil deposits like those ones from the Morrison Formation with Diplodocus in them and the ones from tens in the year with Brachiosaurus and and Kentrosaurus and Stegosaurus so a lot of these animals were living around the same time but at the time that all of these dinosaurs have been found no one had any idea that they were birds living as well at that time until these specimens were first discovered it's around the size of a magpie as you can see from the cast here weighs around one kilogram and it's possibly able to fly or glide and we'll talk about that a little bit later on but it also has many features which are more representative of small dinosaurs and one of the fascinating things about this fossil is that there are only 12 specimens known and because there's been so much interest in this animal they are extremely familiar to everybody and each of those vestments has its own name so today we're going to look at the environment in which our bird lived the specimens some of their stories and the morphology though the the types of the structures that they have within their bodies and we're going to look at the day to day lifestyle of the world's most famous fowl so let's start off with the D positional setting and the salt Hofmann limestone is located on a high plateau just to the north of Munich and rivers there cut through hundreds of metres of Late Jurassic limestone's including the Seoul Hoff and limestone and as you can see from these photographs here this limestone is extremely thin delaminated and this allows it to be split into these microscopically thin layers so initially this was used as a building stone and then they realized that it was such high quality is so fine-grained and so perfectly preserved that they could use it for printing as well so because they've done all of this work and they've split so many thousands and millions of pieces of this limestone this has led to the discovery of some amazing fossils as well so the fossils are actually very very scarce but it's just that these quarries have been working since the 1820s and so over that time they found a lot of fossils and the preservation of these fossils because the rock is so fine-grained is absolutely outstanding and I just want to point out here that this is my daughter when we went to Seoul often many years ago she's 23 now but she's busy yeah looking for Archaeopteryx in the quarries there and you can still go there today and look for these fossils so at the time of deposition so as I said over here in the states and the Morrison Formation we had these large dinosaurs and down in in Tanzania as well but so often at that time was sitting at about in this area here we're sitting at about 25 to 30 degrees north so it was a nice subtropical climate warm semi-arid and we've got evidence from things like these Bela nights here and also from the carbonate deposition that the temperature was around 26 degrees C so it was really beautiful lifestyle for these animals there's not a lot of indication of any runoff of sediment from the land deposits so you don't see anything mixed in with these these carbonate rocks and that suggests that we didn't have a lot of precipitation in the area so it was fairly dry and the kind of plants that we find in these deposits like this lovely conifer here are also suggesting relatively dry conditions so what we had in the Solon - world was that you had small islands dotted around in a big Lagoon alaria and then a large C sitting to the south which is called the thethe associates Joseon that extended down way over the equator and then to the east and then also to the north we had some more land deposits as well so you have to imagine this area here with these nice Lagoon all deposits which are shown in blue here and then little odd islands that are sitting in between them so within those lagoons you were having this deposits of these really fine-grained sediments and so this is what the sea bed might have looked like that they're very very fine-grained kind of muddy deposits you know in if you've ever been on holiday and you walk into this beautiful looking Lagoon and all of the mud squidge is that round your feet that's the kind of environment that we're in at this point and you find a variety of fauna in here and we'll have a look later on it that the range of fauna but we find both marine forms which have probably washed in or swum in from the south from them from this tether social and we also find terrestrial animals so like Archaeopteryx and some of its relatives as well so a very Lagoona atmosphere and a lot of quite muddy deposits so when you go and look at these lagoons in more detail what you find is that the the lagoons were really not a very nice place to be so we had a nice open marine area to the south where these animals were having a great time but when the animals made their way into the lagoons parts of the lagoons were very stagnant and very toxic and you had a lot of evaporation going on as well which created very high salinity so you would literally have situations where the animals would swim into the lagoon alaria and just about died on the spot so first of all you end up with a lot of marine animals which have died but the other nice thing for us is that it means that when animals like Archaeopteryx if they flew into this area and then died and died in the lagoon when they fell down to the bottom of the sea instead of being scavenged by lots of predators small animals gastropods and bivalves these corpses would just lie on the lagoon bed and just have the chance to fossilize absolutely perfectly and I put this picture in here this is some experiments that were done to try and recreate the Solnhofen world where they put dead frogs into tanks and they created the chemistry to match what that we think was going on in the Late Jurassic and you can see that these frogs here were gradually coated by bacteria these cyanobacterial mats and then uncovered up and so the mats were helping to preserve them so you'd have this bacterial mats that would cover up the specimens and then you'd have a very fine grain drain of sediment that would finish them off and would create the fossils and you actually end up way if you look at a bed of this limestone you'll see a bed like this and then they'll just be a little bump a little pedestal where the actual fossil is preserved and this example here this is just showing one a beautiful horseshoe crab that has it's an ad of iral so what it's done it was wandering along quite happily on the lagoon bed and then it entered one of these toxic areas and then it just took its last faltering steps before it just died at that point and you see that a lot you see fish in the process of eating animals which have just been fossilized on the spot so what let's have a look at what it might have looked like at that time and we can see what kind of world we were in so this is saundh often in the Late Jurassic this is not my reconstruction but I think it paints a very nice picture of what was going on at the time so we had these scattered islands here in a nice Lagoon or situation here is the lagoon sitting in here and then this would be the test see out here so you can imagine fish that would be swimming in through these gaps here between the rocks and as they come in then they're just basically passing out due to the toxic nature of the sediment so on as far as the land deposits go it's a relatively arid environment I've got this picture here from northern Australia which I think provides quite a good idea of what what what it might have been like at the time with some scattered vegetation along the coast but fairly dry inland of that looking at modern analogues when you when you look in the literature and you look for suggestions one of the thing one of the places they suggest it's in the Gulf of Mexico and half way down the edge of the Gulf of Mexico as you're going into deeper water you get these little ponds of very very saline deposits we're also evaporation has led to these very salt rich ponds that are sitting on the seabed and they are known as the jacuzzis of despair which I think is a beautiful term so for our for our purposes these are I think they're too deep water and another nice analog is looking at Shark Bay which is in Western Australia and here you're also seeing hypersaline lagoons and you've got these lagoons here which often at least twice normal salinity levels high evaporation rates and you don't get a lot of freshwater coming in because it is a very dry arid sort of area and what's going on in Western Australia is that you've got a lot of these stromatolites so this is another type of bacterial deposit that's forming that that's growing in place so in an hour sawing off an example from Germany from the Jurassic we're seeing more mats bacterial mats but here we're actually seeing the growth of these dramatic bodies these big rounded bodies but otherwise it's really quite a similar environment and what you also find and I talked to a guy who did his PhD on this just to ask him is that you do find animals which are getting that dying out in the shallow waters here that are often very well preserved as well so he actually said that he saw some shark skeletons a shark shark bodies which was still preserved on the seabed in this area so let's have a look at some of the key specimens of Archaeopteryx and pretty much everything we know as I said comes from twelve specimens and possibly from one extra feather as well that have been found so and of these new classification systems of men that not not even all of these are now classified as Archaeopteryx themselves so no surprises here no two of these specimens are really the same and you can see this I've just drawn some sketches here just to show you roughly what each of these fossils looks like and you can see that they form a kind of growth series there's small ones and bigger ones so this is the probably the youngest one the eichstätt specimen and then the the the London specimen is probably the most mature and this one is also quite a large animal here the solarfun specimen but they form a kind of growth series through time but we haven't found any babies and we haven't found any eggs and the reason for this is that we haven't really found the land deposits to go with our lagoons and this is a problem in terms of behave sorting out the behavior of Archaeopteryx because normally you'd be hoping to see footprints and things like that and we don't have a lot of those trace fossils and eggs and things like that so a lot of what we know about their behavior we've had to just determine from supposition and from using analogs to other animals so you'll see that as we go on so the preservation varies widely in these specimens and it varies in terms of the degree of articulation so how well their bones are joined together in the fossils the degree of completeness some of them are not very complete at all as we'll see particularly in one specimen and the orientation that their bodies formed when they landed on the lagoon bed so this was the quilling news swilling news where the first feather was found back in 1861 and this took the world by storm if you can imagine one feather creating news across the world this was that feather because it was the first evidence of birds in the Jurassic that had ever been discovered consists of two counts of slabs so these are the two sides which are now stored in different music and you can see by looking at this feather if you followed the kind of the quill as it goes up through the feather that it's very asymmetric the asymmetric is good because that usually suggests that you've got a winged feather with the capabilities of flight much like if you have an aircraft and their aircraft wings if you look at the wings and take a section through them and look at them they are not symmetrical otherwise they wouldn't work in terms of providing lift to the to the plane there was some evidence of a pattern on these feathers possibly with light and dark spots like a partridge or a hawk and they seem to have been preserved also by these microbial mats and they were described by this gentleman hermann von maya in 1861 and he had some reservations about whether the feather was from a bird but he had already seen one of our skeletons that we're going to look at in a minute which gave him some background information to suppose that this probably was from a bird anyway back in 2018 so last year they used a new technique to look at this feather called laser stimulated fluorescence and the results were only published last month so this is hot off the presses and what they found was that they were able to see this is what the feather looks like in white light this is what it looks like in the old drawing but this is what it looks like with this image and you can actually see the quill the pointy quill here extending so this would have been the bit that's stuck into the animal to hold it in place and what they found was that this quill does not have the right shape to be a bird feather so this famous feather that was named Archaeopteryx ancient wing and was all supposed to be from the first bird actually turns out to come from a feathered dinosaur rather than a bird so this is the Archaeopteryx that wasn't however there were many Archaeopteryx --is that were and one of the most famous is the London specimen which was found in one of the quarries locally and probably given to the local doctor in return for medical services and so he got Herman from Maya to describe this specimen as well and there was huge controversy about this because a lot of anti Darwinists it was his right at the time when the Origin of Species was published which was 1859 so two years before so a lot of the scientists are trying to poopoo the idea and say no this is can't be a bird this can't be evidence of evolution in Birds this has to be some kind of reptile and in the end one of the believers which was Richard Owen who coined the term dinosaur he bought it for the Natural History Museum in London for 450 pounds and apparently the money was used by haba lion this this doctor as a dowry for his daughter so that's kind of nice that the Archaeopteryx paid for the wedding so it's a lovely specimen in terms of the wings but it's missing its head and neck which should be up in here and it's nice that Darwin actually had a look at the specimen himself and he said that strange bird with a long lizard like tail it shows how little we as yet know of the former inhabitants of the world so he was fascinated by this animal as well in terms of its evolutionary potential after this the next specimen that was found is probably the most complete specimen and possibly the most beautiful fossil in the world has been described this way so this is the Berlin specimen and you can see it's got these almost angelic style wings this is the one that we have down here as well so you can get an a good idea of the size and this was eventually sold to a blind son who was also a doctor after being exchanged for a cow so that's the price of an Archaeopteryx back in 1864 it's a it's basically a count so once happy lion had this specimen he was really struggling to sell it because a lot of people were still doubting about whether it was real and he was asking for an awful lot of money but some of that some museums were excited by it so eventually it was bought by Berlin the Berlin museum who outbid the Peabody Museum at Yale and it's now known to be as a subspecies and probably not quite mature because the the sternum so this this area here is not fully ossified so it hasn't quite turned to bone and and if you if you look at a juvenile chicken you can actually bend the bones in the juvenile chicken before they really get kind of ossified and more bony so lots of other specimens have turned up over the years since then and not all of them have been quite as impressive as those two first specimens so that this is the max berg specimen each of these specimens is named after the museum where it's now located and the quarry worker who found it actually thought it was a crayfish so that gives you an idea of the style of preservation so when you look at it you can see it looks like a bit of a mess so it's missing its head and tail its but mostly disarticulated as well and this belonged to a quarry owner Edward optic and he he was a famously bad-tempered mad and he tried very hard to sell this specimen for a lot of money and he failed to sell it and in the end he took it away from the museum and put it under his bed and said I'm not going to show it to anybody and so when he died 15 years after he took it out from the museum they looked under his bed and the Archaeopteryx was gone so this specimen is completely missing right now and no doubt it's in somebody's private collection somewhere and they're not saying where it is but all we have is a few casts to go on this is the Haarlem specimen here which obviously is living in Holland right now and there was originally described as a pterodactyl it was actually the very first skeletal specimen that was found but it was a pterodactyl until 1970 when John Ostrom had a look at it and he reclassified it and they've actually realized that this is not an Archaeopteryx exactly it's a related species called Australia and what's interesting about this is that Australia is not thought to have had flight capabilities so it lived further to the east and it's this specimen was found further to the east and it couldn't have flown across to the islands and the lagoon alaria where the rest of the Archaeopteryx is were found and I've just shown this specimen here this is reason I'm showing you this one it's the Burgermeister specimen is because it's called the chicken wing so that is that basically oh sorry this specimen here is that's all it is it's just one wing so you could almost imagine having that with a I don't know a little bit of a spicy sauce I don't know what kind of chicken wings you like to have but that's basically what we have there is just a chicken wing so there's some more complete specimens that turned up as well and I've already mentioned the eichstätt specimen which is a surprisingly small specimen here but very similar actually in character to the the Berlin specimen except that the wings aren't as well preserved and this was bought as a pterosaur by this guy Maya who was a priest and he realized there was an Archaeopteryx and he had a crisis of conscience because he didn't want to put it on the market he didn't know what to do so he basically just stored it and hid it in his house until he died so it's it sat there for a long time before it was properly analyzed and smallest knowns best min and it has the second best head if you want to classify best heads I don't know who has the best head in this room possibly this guy down here and then the sole Hubble specimen was originally classified as a dinosaur because it's very that's fed us on this specimen are very difficult to see and very very poorly preserved so and it's also an extremely large specimen as well so that's the Solon Hoffman specimen and then just going to show you two more this is the munich specimen and they're kind of a nice story about this one is that the quarry man who found it saved all the slabs because it's on several different pieces and he pour all of the slabs aside and when they put it back together they had both halves but they were missing a piece and they went back to the area where he'd stored all of these blocks and they went through something like 450 blocks that he'd put aside and they found the rest of the specimen so it's thanks to him and his only reward apparently was the thank you after which the quarry owner who owned the specimen sold it for two million Deutschmarks so it's kind of nice that good old Jurgen that the quarry man got a thank you and then the Thermopolis specimen which was found in 2005 is has been very valuable to us in terms of having the best preserved head the best preserved feet and some excellent plumage as well so all all of these fossils they've provided us with different little tip bits of information to try and piece together what was going on with Archaeopteryx so this is not supposed to be a talked about classification and whether you want to lump these specimens together or split them into lots of different species but basically at the moment the story is that we have Archaeopteryx lithographic ax which was the London and Seoul Hoffman specimens and maybe some others and Archaeopteryx semen see which will be the Berlin the Munich and the Thermopolis specimens and if you want to try and subdivide some of the others there are various other subdivisions as well but really we can just stick to these two so I've just shown some pictures of these two over there and this is a diagram from a paper which shows the subtle differences between these different species if you want to go that way so let's look at some of the preservation of some of these specimens and that and what that can tell us about them so first of all let's have a look at to follow me and to follow me is the study of how animals get fossilized and it's real useful science because it gives us lots of information about behavior and about how things were going on at the time of deposition so let's start off with the perfect example this beautiful pearl in specimen fully articulated complete skull and lower jaw it's got that folded back neck that you see in so many of these specimens and this probably drowned in a lake and only floated on the surface of the lake for a few hours before sinking to the bottom of the lagoon where it was fossilized basically lying like that another very complete specimen was that sole hoffen specimen so that hard to see the feathers but it was buried and almost completely articulated so this also probably was went into the water into the lagoon and sank pretty rapidly then we turned to the London specimen and this had much more deep decomposition so it's missing a foot I've put them in pink here it's missing its head which should be here there's a few fragments of the skull but that's all it's missing the claws down here and and yet that the other foot is there's just one of the feet the other the other foot is missing there and it's estimated I don't quite know how they did this but the scientists scientists who studied this at the nitrogen museum estimated that it drifted for up to 27 days so less than a month anyway but might have been less than that so it was drifting around and the ligaments were starting to break a little bit and then probably was exposed for a further time on the lagoon bed so it's that's that's showing that there's definitely some real decomposition there and then finally the munich specimen over here which it really is a mess once again that the head is missing here but the skeletons pretty much completely disintegrated we've lost the skull we've lost the cervicals these ribs hurt here and we've lost part of the hind limb the ribcage is separated and jumbled across the body and so this suggests that there was quite a lot of transport of this specimen before it was deposited so it might have may have died on the beach and then being washed out into the lagoon or system so just kind of the final bird bath the final story that our bird dies initially it probably floats on the surface of the lagoon although this is not an Archaeopteryx so I should tell you this is actually our national bird the Canada Goose and then the the bird eventually sinks to the bed of the lagoon either in the nice completes like this if you're looking at the Berlin specimen or in a more disarticulated state that would be more suggestive of something like the munich specimen its then interred beneath microbial mats so the mass were the microbes and the bacterial mats would grow over at the top of it and they would encase it basically and protect it from being further further decomposed and then finally you'd get more sediment that was deposited on top of it in this bottom diagram here and that you would have no idea that there was even a fossil there unless you started splitting apart all of these blocks so what about the skeletal features of this animal and what they can tell us so first of all I'm going to draw your attention to these two diagrams here and you have you have to tell me which one you think is the Archaeopteryx anybody want to have a guess the top one the top one is the Archaeopteryx the top one has these longer arms and it has much smaller peg like teeth in this mouth but otherwise it's surprisingly similar to Deinonychus and this is Deinonychus one of our famous carnivores from the early cretaceous and very very similar to Archaeopteryx so they looks like they had a similar morphology and possibly that they had quite a similar lifestyle so our our Archaeopteryx around 300 to 500 millimeters long so this size as we can see from the specimen magpie size basically that and as far as the head goes light skull narrow lower jaw with sharp teeth the teeth are not serrated so it's not like they did the kind of dinner dinners knife of steak knife teeth that you see in a carnivore that the teeth are a bit more peg like and a bit more simple than that and probably would be used for grabbing rather than for cutting and large eyes in our specimen and we're going to see the comparison in a minute to show how big those eyes really were which means that they're good for observation good for hunting possibly used at night short neck air sacs in the in its body like modern Birds and then the limbs three fingers on the hand hind limbs were very similar to our theropod down here our meat-eating dinosaur and then a hallux there's this little bone back back here like modern Birds suggesting that they had some kind of grip Alexes the bone at the back of the foot that helps with the grasping so looking at the skulls we can see that there's a really quite a strong similarity between our skulls here so dromaeosaurus over here on the right and Archaeopteryx on the left very similar in terms of kind of like the overall structure with these large fossa these large holes in the skull a big even bigger eye socket in the in Archaeopteryx than in the Deinonychus and obviously the teeth are a little bit different but generally the overall structure is pretty similar between these animals if we zoom in on the bird the bird brain here from our Berlin specimen you can actually see these little teeth down here so what's happened with this specimen the skulls almost complete it's being compressed so the bottom and upper jaw that jaws have been squished together the orbital socket here takes up a huge amount of the head and 14 millimeters in diameter with what's called a sclerotic ring so the ring of Bones they're rather like you see in something like an ichthyosaur as well and then 12 peg like teeth on each side of the mouth and 12 on the each side at the bottom of the mouth as well and those teeth as I said are quite simple with a slight waist in the middle on the hands and feet so this is looking at the hand of our the Berlin specimen here and you can see these really nice claws up here so the four limbs beautifully preserved three-fingered hands and the fingers are not fused together like they are in a lot of modern Birds the hind limbs show some kind of torsion so they've been a bit a little bit twisted and in this Berlin specimen to the side so the top part is like this and the bottom part is like that so that's that's your Berlin specimen and what we see here is they've got four claws for four toad feet with a with a short shorter first digit and then large a second and third digit and then the clock arc of these of these feet so if you look at the angle that that makes the the amount of a circle that it makes is about 120 degrees which is very much like perching birds and not so much like a ground-dwelling bird so that suggests that first of all that there were trees in this area and that the Archaeopteryx is were probably perching on them at least for some of their lives how about the wings well the plumage in in that that Berlin specimen is incredibly well-preserved as we've already seen with clear feather impressions on both wings on the tail on the legs and on the base of the neck and those feathers are preserved often on the part and counterpart so both of the slabs when they're broken open you can see different aspects of the feathers on both halves and the feathers are actually very very similar to the magpie which is of a similar size so I've got this these are not Archaeopteryx feathers these are the magpie feathers but they're very similar to what you would have seen in the fossil example so we have the long tail feathers here and as you see there's the tail of the magpie and the tail of our Archaeopteryx then we have the primary feathers and we have the secondary feathers and when you look at the numbers of these feathers if you compare Archaeopteryx to Magpies you can see that even the numbers are pretty similar as well so magpie is not a bad thought to have in your head if you're thinking about what Archaeopteryx is look like and in terms of the the rest of the feathers on the body specimen number 11 which I showed you guys earlier shows feathers on the hind limbs as well so these as you can see this is the leg of one of our Archaeopteryx is and these are the feathers that are attached to the legs so it's like it kind of had feathered trousers so this is a model here and you can see that it's got these feathery kind of trousers on it very very trendy and what's interesting about these these feather trousers is they were originally on the Berlin specimen as well but they the people who are preparing the specimen and obviously that the skeleton starts off completely encased in the limestone they actually prepared off those leg feathers because they didn't realize that the feathers were there so photographs from the 1890s show the leg feathers but the leg feathers now on the modern specimen like this one here you can't see them anymore because they've actually been prepped off and then another nice feature that you can see on that on this this specimen number 11 is that it's got this beautifully preserved tail so we've seen tails on things like the Berlin specimen but this one shows that they had this little kind of cleft in the middle of the tail here so the tail was had a kind of central parting which was obviously to attract the mates so one of the things that we've been able to do because these specimens are different sizes is that we can start estimating what the growth curves were like for these animals so we go from the eichstätt specimen here the smallest specimen up to the sole Hoffmann one that's the one that you can't really see the feathers very well and we've got a whole growth series in here as well so they've been people who know more about these things than I do have put this together and made a kind of growth curve for these animals and they've estimated that probably from baby to adult juvenile to adult took around three years before they achieved adulthood and the growth rates are slower than the modern birds so that the birds that can then stand soon after birth so those that come out like like chicks and things and and chickens where the chicks come out of the egg and they can stand pretty quickly so three times lower growth rate than those and a much lower growth rate than the helpless babies though the hatch in nests like Robins but much higher growth rate than land reptiles so it's kind of not interesting comparison here with the growth rates with those different species so let's have a think about how these animals might have behaved so first the first big question to ask is could Archaeopteryx fly so the feathers have a lower asymmetry than modern birds and as we said asymmetry is very important for flying so the asymmetry maintains aerodynamic integrity because it help allows the feathers to deform under loads and also it adds to lift so there's some evidence that it could they could have lift but not as much with some modern Birds the wrist joints exhibit some features that are seen in modern birds so the risks themselves have some flexibility but the shoulder joints are pretty stiff so instead of having this beautiful flapping motion there which is going to look great on the video they had they were pretty stiff so they could kind of probably wobble around so it suggests that maybe they were better at gliding than they were at actually flapping along and they also had a limited musculature and we can estimate the musculature by looking at the bones and looking at the muscle scars on the bones and it suggests that maybe at low speeds they you they weren't able to do the flap but they they may have been able to flap at slightly higher speed so once they'd achieved some speed and they were flying along there maybe they could have flap their wings so there's some some thoughts that maybe they they had a kind of running takeoff because they couldn't just flap and take off they do a running takeoff rather like a grebe that you might see on a in a lake so they can running on water and gradually managing to get enough speed up that where they could take off and if you look at the bones of Archaeopteryx and you plot them up against modern animals that they plot closest to things like pheasants and turkeys and I don't know whether any of you guys have seen a turkey or a pheasant flying but they are not the world's most adept fliers they're pretty messy in terms of taking active flight so I think that might be quite a good model for us to think about when we think about Archaeopteryx and one of the other important things is that their their brains are big enough for flying so that because we've got these beautifully preserved skulls that we've been able to look at in three dimensions by scanning them then we've seen that the brain elements definitely give them enough kind of brain power to allow them to fly as well and then a little bit of practical nature they but at least twelve specimens to be found in the middle of a lagoon so how did they get into the lagoon were they all washed in from the sides or were they just kind of flying along and then they just died in midair so I don't think all of them necessarily would have been washed in from the side so that suggests that they had enough power whether it was gliding or flying to actually fly out over water and to be confident that they were flying while they were flying over water right color great paper was published in 2012 by a chap called Carney who found what he thought were men melanosomes indicating black feathers and melanosomes were there the same thing that make make us go dark in the summer in terms of tanning and there's some evidence when he looks at these microscopic structures which may have been bacterial but he thought that they were melanosomes which suggested black feathers and I put down here at the bottom it's it's interesting that dark feathers are actually stronger because of these melanosomes so that would also help the Archaeopteryx to have a more stable feather pattern other authors looked and they said well it looks a bit more like black and white based on the distribution of the organic sulfur within these so you can imagine these scientists around the world doing this painstaking observations on these on these fossils and the fossils are so valuable it's not like you can scrape a little bit off to have a good look at this has all got to be done remotely so they've done all of these studies to try and look at these so unfortunately that that study with the both of these studies here use that wing from 1861 which is a lovely idea but as we now know as of last month that wing is not a Archaeopteryx wing is the dinosaur wing so now we we have a good idea that probably there were dinosaurs were black wings living at that time so anyway then they did a new analysis of two feathers from some of the other specimens so from the specimen number 11 and the Thermopolis specimen and they found that there were distinct black and white patterns on the birds plumage which might be comparable to the pigmentation on a magpie so lighter in color with black tips to the wings and this was partly based on traces of copper using a very fancy x-ray machine called the Stanford synchrotron radiation light source which fortunately has been abbreviated so that's where we stand right now is that probably they look something like this or even like this with just like a hint of lighter colors on them but yes actually Archaeopteryx was mostly probably a black bird right how do they go about feeding so there's lots of thoughts about feeding and some people believed that they were just kind of like wandering around on mostly on the ground just picking up insects and things like that but we we know from what we've seen already that they were probably capable of gliding and possibly even flapping so I like to think of them as a slightly more active predator so they've got these giant eyes and this is a this is a Archaeopteryx I hear with this sclerotic ring so they've probably able to hunt at night as well so you can imagine them flying around and this one in the middle here is flying around and swooping down to catch a baby Compsognathus that was just making his way along the forest floor and then we have another one here that theoretically could be attacking and catching a frog so it's likely that they had quite a variety of diet maybe reptiles amphibians mammals insects and sees their prey with the jaws because the jaws had these kind of biting teeth rather than really incising teeth and maybe using the claws to help to pin down larger prey and then we have to think a little bit outside the box we don't really know what's going on could they have done something more like black herons when they you know use their wings as a as a way of shading the water while they were catching fish in the water as well and the margins of these lagoons so that the jury is out we don't know we don't have a lot of evidence but certainly from the anatomical evidence it seems that they were active predators rather than scavengers and then I was out running the other day and along the the bow river and I saw a magpie having a bath and I kind of had in my mind about Magpies and Archaeopteryx is being the same size and I thought well you can't prove any of this but this is always the Archaeopteryx may have behaved I mean they they had to do they had to live their lives so first of all they had to make nests so it's likely that the Archaeopteryx is were carrying nesting material in their mouths and most likely they were nesting on the ground I mean I don't think anybody's going to suggest that they were making fancy nests in the trees although we don't have any fossil evidence by the way but most of the dinosaurs are you making these mounds on the ground so that's probably what they were doing they were probably having the odd bath here and there and this is what I saw a magpie doing the other day they may have been fighting with each other they may have been feeding on parasites much like egrets do on the backs of cattle or or hippopotamuses they may have been sharing food they may have been fighting over food and they may even have been a little bit of naughty business going on as well which but unfortunately because of the lack of terrestrial evidence from this area because all of the fossilized sediments are from this Lagoon all and marine environments we don't actually know what's happening into their behavior until we find something with some terrestrial traces so some trace fossils trace evidence from land that might show some of these activities I just wanted to show you a couple of pictures of some of the associated fauna because it's great to look at Archaeopteryx but Archaeopteryx did not live in isolation there were a lot of other animals living around at the same time and thanks to the Sun - limestone we have this incredible preservation so there's plenty of evidence for the insects so that it might have been eating I've got this dragonfly here but there's lots of other insects there are lots of shallow marine organisms lots of arthropods so shrimps crabs lobsters there will jellyfish there were echinoderms by these ones and ammonites as well that's and in fact one of the specimens that one of the most recent specimen that's been found which is known as the new specimen which was found three years ago that actually has a ammonite fossilized on the same slab as the Archaeopteryx and this is just to show this dendritic pattern this is this is manganese mineralization and this has helped to preserve some of these fossils and to preserve the structures on that on the surface of the fossils then they revert to Brits as well and these are just a mix of vertebrates so we have some lizards here we have a lot of fish here as well and we have one dinosaur just one dinosaur which is this Compsognathus so this is it we're we're in a more marine environment it's not like many dinosaurs have been washed out into these lagoons we've just got that one apart from our Archaeopteryx which you could possibly describe this dinosaurs as well and then I just wanted to zoom in on these two pterodactyls because they are just some of the most incredibly preserved animals quite a few of our Archaeopteryx is started their lives as pterodactyls before they realized about the plumage so that some of them were misidentified and this example here has once something that I mentioned earlier where this fish is gone I'd fish has been swimming along and it's caught this pterodactyl in its jaws but then obviously swum into one of these toxic areas and just died so it's literally fossilized in the process of trying to eat itself some lunch so I'm just going to summarize by saying that Archaeopteryx may no longer be the oldest bird we've now got evidence going back about another 14 to 16 million years mainly from China that there were Birds even older than this specimen but it's still an iconic fossil that heralded the world of birds and has really brought people's attention to the fact that the the lineage of birds goes back so far in history it's inspired the imaginations of generations of dinosaur enthusiasts including Darwin as we saw earlier Richard Owen and Cuvier so some of the most famous minds in the world have worked over these specimens it shows a fascinating combination of reptilian and bird features with the teeth claws bony tail lack of beak and ventral ribs that you would associate with a dinosaur but also the plumage the wishbone and the backwards directed pubis which have clearly had bird affinities and in addition to that the the gradual changes in the style of the skulls of birds so this is an Archaeopteryx and this is a chicken here it was using neoteny beginning to use neoteny so this is where instead of evolving and growing up features of your body stay in an infant state to allow you to develop more fully so humans do this as well baby's head so some your baby's head develops at a different rate to the rest of the body to allow your brain to develop further than it would in monkeys so there it's using this kind of evolutionary techniques to make it have a more a skull that's more suitable for bird activities so it's completely impossible to put a value on fossils like this berlin specimen but i would say that certainly there's something like this if this was the original we would be worth fifty million dollars something like that far more valuable than boring old sue the terran tyrannosaurus rex and i would say that this remains the world's most famous birds so we have much left to learn about this animal but we do know one thing and that it never ever misses breakfast because it's the early bird that catches the worm thank you I don't think there's any evidence for the lifted toe in the middle but definitely the first toe the primary toe is shorter than the other two so it has three forward pointing toes on the foot and I love those the first one the one on the inside is shorter than the others but I've never seen any evidence from the fossils it's more the fact that when they're flattened down when those three three forward-facing toes are flattened down that usually what happens is that one of them goes above the other one just like if you squished our feet from the sides then that that would happen as well but I haven't seen any evidence that it's actually raised like this so I don't think that's the case good question though yes so so it's that that's also a really good question so I go back to that that horseshoe crab that we saw and the horseshoe crabs in the death spiral so that traces are almost completely absent in this Lagoon all setting so normally you're going to get a lot of feeding traces from snails that are wandering around on the sea on the lagoon bed you'll get lots of worms and things that are living inside the the sediment and because we've got these really finely layered sediments as well all of those should be preserved and we basically don't see any of those at all so there's almost no evidence that anything was able to survive there and apart from those death spirals so there have a couple of horseshoe crabs that have wandered in you don't see any trace fossils so I think we can be pretty confident that nothing apart from the bacteria was able to live down there yes yeah and they actually think that a lot of these animals were washed in during storms so you'd have a kind of influx of storm waters and almost instantaneous you know you might wash in a jellyfish or something like that and the jellyfish would just immediately be kind of subsumed into this highly saline toxic waters and it would just be kind of preserved there and nothing could get to it yes the back yes only marginally down yeah yeah so there's a there's a vanishingly small number of people who think that they should still be doing that and my brother I don't know whether you any of you guys know but my brother's a heraldic artist so he draws grants of arms and when people get knighted on calfskin but he's one of only eight people in the world who does that so it is a very small industry and lithography is about the same but what the most the last three specimens that have been found have been found by collectors so they allow collectors to go into the into the all the quarries they're still most the quarries are still open and the collectors are the ones splitting these layer layer by layer by layer and I know that there's still a much smaller amount of stone being processed but that that I think is our best opportunity to find more specimens yeah as far as I know so I haven't been there for about I went there about probably nearly 20 years ago so it's good that this t-shirt has lasted but I was there a while ago and when I was in the quarry it was on a it was on a weekday and they were probably forty people collecting no quarry was about the size of four or five soccer pitches together and there was lots of material there for splitting so I don't know whether they're actually going in and occasionally bulldozing it some of the quarries are but I think a couple of the quarries are still active so they are still using a little bit of this stone but I think yeah the the level of activity is much less but at least there's a lot of people collecting and looking for the material and when you go there I mean everyone's excited they might find a Archaeopteryx but the one thing you do find a lot of these little critters they called sac oma and they're but they're only about the centimeter across but there's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them in the quarry so they kind of give you a little bit of hope that you might find something else but yeah yeah the chance of finding more is small but not impossible yeah that's another question here yes yeah I would have thought that was an excellent excellent chance of that happening because yeah there are a lot of pterosaurs in there there's no Archaeopteryx could not have been a very abundant animal at that time because we don't find many of the fossils but hundreds of pterosaurs have been collected for this so yeah I think that's I hadn't actually thought about that but yeah it's almost like bait you send the fish in the fish die and then everyone else comes zooming in to try and grab them and then they end up getting poisoned as well yeah good thank you very much [Applause] come back next week next week we'll have dr. Suzanne cootie from the University of Calgary we'll be talking about I think it's Pliocene apes that live in Eastern Africa at the same time that the ancestors of humans evolved so if you want to know more about what type of monkeys and if you want to come and have a look at the cast or ask John for questions thanks thanks for sorry

Channel: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology

Views: 33,247

Rating: 4.9045348 out of 5

Keywords: Speaker Series, Royal Tyrrell Museum, palaeontology, paleontology, Archaeopteryx

Id: yCd3TuSK6tU

Length: 51min 59sec (3119 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/alllie]

From /r/LDQ

Dr. Jon Noad (Gran Tierra Energy) discusses the palaeontological history of Archaeopteryx and its ecological niche in the Late Jurassic world.

Archaeopteryx has captured the imagination of millions since its discovery over 150 years ago in southern Germany. Long considered as the transitional species between dinosaurs and birds, time has done little to lessen the scientific impact of Archaeopteryx. Twelve specimens, in various states of preservation, have been recovered from the Late Jurassic lagerstätten of the Solnhofen Limestone. These specimens have helped to build a picture of a magpie-sized bird that may have been capable of powered flight. The stories of the individual fossils are captivating—including one that went missing—and their scientific value is almost incalculable.

The Archaeopteryx fossils were recovered from a thinly laminated mudstone deposited during the Jurassic in a series of basins separated by coral reefs. A combination of periodic high amounts of saltiness, stagnation, and partial absence of oxygen meant that any animals entering the affected waters died almost instantly, sinking to the basin floor where their corpses were entombed. Scavengers were absent due to the toxic conditions near the seabed, meaning that many animals were almost perfectly preserved.

Detailed comparative anatomy has shown the similarity of Archaeopteryx to birds and small theropod dinosaurs. The superb preservation of the Solnhofen fossils shows their plumage, and recent studies have provided evidence for the colour, and potential for flight.

[u/Skrp]

So not chickens then? As title holder for most famous bird, I mean.