Paleontologists in China have discovered a small Jurassic bird that was likely a land-based predator — like a carnivorous pheasant with killer claws. It had some features of birds and others of dinosaurs, suggesting that the earliest birds had a greater diversity of lifestyles than previously recognized.
Jurassic birds first emerged 150 million to 148 million years ago, and fossils of them are rare, so experts are just starting to understand how early birds diversified and evolved the ability to fly.
Analysis of the fossilized skeleton revealed the animal was small and weighed about 1.8 pounds (0.8 kilograms). "It was probably as large as a crow," Wang told Live Science via email.
"Its key anatomical features are the combination of dinosaurs' and birds' features: for instance, its teeth, pectoral gird, and especially the hyperextensible, 'sickle-clawed' second pedal digit are similar to that of dinosaurs," Wang said. Meanwhile, he said its slender cranial bones and bird-like pelvis are comparable to early birds.
This combination of features suggests that "the morphological gap between birds and dinosaurs is much smaller than we thought," he added.
This adds to evidence that "the ability to fly arose not once, but several times among disparate groups of carnivorous dinosaurs that are closely related to birds," wrote Fernando Novas, a paleontologist at the Felix de Azara Natural History Foundation in Buenos Aires, Argentina, who wasn’t involved in the study, in an accompanying article in Nature. This includes flight evolving in early birds and in scansoriopterygid dinosaurs, which had membranous folds like the wings of bats, and the four-winged microraptors. Y. yangyuanensis seems to have taken a different road, eschewing the flying ways of its relatives.
"It highlights the extraordinary breadth of ecological and morphological diversification that took place close to the origins of avialans," Wang said.
The underground impact structure, known as Ames crater, is located in northern Oklahoma and is named after a small town that sits above the submerged crater. At around 10 miles (16 kilometers) wide, it is the fourth-largest impact structure in the U.S.
Ames crater was created when an Eiffel Tower-size space rock slammed into our planet at more than 70,000 mph (110,000 km/h). At the time, the region was covered in a shallow ocean, and the crater was subsequently buried beneath layers of seafloor sediment. Therefore, there are no visible signs of the crater at the surface today. It was only discovered in 1991, when oil prospectors accidentally drilled into it.
Until now, researchers thought Ames crater dated to the Ordovician meteor event around 467 million years ago. During this period, an unusually high number of large space rocks smashed into Earth, likely due to the fragmentation of a single parent body somewhere in space. Scientists found fossils of marine animals in and around the crater that date to around the time of that event.
But in the new study, published July 7 in the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, researchers analyzed fracture patterns within tiny rocky fragments known as zircon crystals that were embedded in the underground crater. This revealed that the impact actually occurred 370 million years ago, around 97 million years after the Ordovician meteor event.
There are no visible signs of the Ames crater today. However, scientists have been able to map out its size and shape using ground-penetrating radar. This circle represents the rough outline of the the submerged structure. (Image credit: EarthExplorer/USGS/Landsat with annotations Harry Baker)"No matter what technique we used, it was coming back to this younger signal," study first author Elizabeth Catlos, a geologist and planetary scientist at the University of Texas at Austin, said in a statement.
Reading crystals
Zircon crystals are tiny pieces of a superdurable mineral known as zirconium silicate. These crystals are scattered throughout most of Earth's rock formations, including most of the oldest known rocks on our planet. The near-industructible crystals are extremely useful to geologists because their internal structure preserves evidence of being exposed to extreme conditions, such as high temperatures and intense pressures.
Analyzing zircon crystals is now one of the primary methods of dating ancient meteor craters, and the technique has led to several other impact dates being revised. For example, in July, researchers in Australia revealed that the North Pole Dome crater was around 500 million years younger than initial studies predicted, and in 2025, experts found that the impact that birthed Scotland's Stac Fada Member structure happened around 200 million years later than earlier research estimated.
The crystals offer insight into what Earth may have looked like shortly after it formed and have recently been used to more accurately date the moon.
The internal structure of zircon crystals preserves evidence of being exposed to extreme conditions, such as high temperature and pressure, making them ideal for exploring ancient impacts. This photo, captured during a completely unrelated study, shows one such crystal under an electron microscope. (Image credit: Emmanuel Roquette via Wikimedia)"These small crystals allow us to go back in time and learn about the major changes to Earth's ancient landscapes," study co-author Danny Stockli, a geologist and dean of the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin, said in the statement. "It would be great to do this for more of the meteor impact sites across the continent so we could get a more accurate timeline for these major events."
"This is where the impact belongs"
The crater's new age takes it firmly out of the Ordovician meteor event and places it into the Frasnian-Famennian mass extinction event, also known as the Kellwasser event or the Late Devonian mass extinction.
During the Frasnian-Famennian event, which began around 372 million years ago and lasted for several million years, as much as half of all marine life went extinct as Earth's oceans were depleted of oxygen. The die-off, which was most likely triggered by global cooling due to increased levels of volcanic activity, is often cited as one of the five major extinction events in Earth's history.
The researchers emphasized that the Ames impact was not the cause of the Frasnian-Famennian event. However, they noted that the fallout from the impact, which would have injected huge clouds of dust into the air, may have contributed to the atmospheric cooling effect in the region.
It is an important reminder that the ability to accurately date specific events like this can inform our understanding of wider global patterns and trends, the researchers wrote.
"With this research, we're basically taking a major pawn out of the Ordovician Meteor Event and dumping it into the Frasnian-Famennian event, and saying, 'This is where this impact belongs,'" Catlos said.
The new study was dedicated to co-authors Andrew Parisi and Michael Brookfield, who sadly died before it was published.
'> One of America's biggest meteor craters is 100 million years younger than we thought — and coincided with a global extinction event . However, a CT scan showed no signs of swelling or hemorrhage in her head. The doctors attempted a lumbar puncture (also called a spinal tap) but failed to collect any cerebrospinal fluid that they could test for irregularities.
The doctors judged the girl to be too medically unstable to be referred to the hospital's psychiatric ward, so she was admitted to the general pediatric department. Pediatric neurologists suggested an electroencephalogram (EEG), a test that measures electric signaling in the brain, but this revealed no further clues.
Meanwhile, interventional radiologists performed a successful second lumbar puncture, but the girl's cerebrospinal fluid appeared normal in the initial panels they ran.
After the patient had spent eight days in the hospital, psychiatrists recommended that the girl be transferred to their ward. However, this was not possible because she developed problems with feeding herself. Her continued psychotic symptoms were treated with the antipsychotic drug olanzapine.
The girl was discharged after having spent almost two months in the hospital. She was treated with ongoing prescriptions of olanzapine and lorazepam, as well as prednisone and monthly immunoglobulin treatments. As her symptoms improved over the following year, she stopped taking the psychiatric drugs but continued her immunotherapy.
The case report did not name a specific trigger for the girl's condition, but the authors noted that anti-NIF autoimmune encephalitis has been documented in adults following infections, including certain tick-borne bacterial infections, HIV and COVID-19. Cases associated with these infections are rarer than those linked to tumors.
The doctors did not attribute the teen's case to a specific infection, but her family did report that she'd had a cough three weeks before going to the emergency room. The family had visited the Philippines, and the girl and multiple relatives came down with the same illness.
This article is for informational purposes only and is not meant to offer medical advice.
'> Teenager's rare autoimmune disorder caused her to hallucinate a flying green dinosaur