The Life Of Birds 1. To Fly Or Not To Fly (7 of 19)

The Life Of Birds

Excavations like the one that's going on here have revealed just how varied the birds had become.
This one has been set in yellow resin to make its details quite clear.
It had a horny beak, a fully feathered wing, a long feathered tail with no bony support and long legs.
It probably looked like a rail 0ther fossils from these shales show that several families of modern birds were already established.
This was a water bird, possibly an ancestor of today's jacana.
It would have found plenty of insects among the floating leaves on the lake.
There were birds with powerful chisel-like bills, perhaps woodpeckers, that even in this early period had started excavating insects from trees nearby.

Another inhabitant of those prehistoric woods had a stubbier, more all-purpose beak, rather like finches do today.
There were tall birds with long powerful legs that hunted for small reptiles on the ground as the South American seriama does.
And there was a gigantic vulture with a wingspan of over 20 feet, bigger even than that of the Andean condor and probably the biggest flying bird that has ever existed.