#enantiornithes

MeetBrevirostruavis macrohyoideus! This Enantiornithine bird is notable for the hyoid structure which indicates it likely had a long tongue, similar to today’s woodpeckers. Here it uses that tongue to lick up small insects from early flowering plants, and maybe a bit of pollen too.

Cuspirostrisornis houi, a member of the Enantiornithes from early Cretaceous China (Jiufotang Formation, ~120 mya). They shared their forests and wetlands with creatures like the more famous PsittacosaurusandMicroraptor.

With a skull only an inch long, Cuspirostrisornis was roughly sparrow-sized. And like many other Enantiornithes, they probably did not have a full tail fan - just a floofy butt with two long ornamental feathers.

Lectavis bretincola, a late Cretaceous member of the Enantiornithes from Argentina, chows down on a captured hermit crab.

The only fossils of this species found so far are legs, but they were long and relatively sturdy, suggesting the bird had a similar size and lifestyle to medium-sized wading birds like curlews. They lived in and around freshwater or brackish lakes and river deltas and possibly feasted on crustaceans and other invertebrates found in those habitats.

Modern birds’ upper beaks are made up mostly from skull bones called the premaxilla, but the snouts of their earlier non-avian dinosaur ancestors were instead formed by large maxilla bones.

AndFalcatakely forsterae here had a very unusual combination of these features.

Living in Madagascar during the Late Cretaceous, about 70-66 million years ago, it was around 40cm long (1'4") and was part of a diverse lineage of Mesozoic birds known as enantiornitheans. These birds had claws on their wings and usually had toothy snouts instead of beaks, and many species also had ribbon-like display feathers on their tails instead of lift-generating fans.

Falcatakely had a long tall snout very similar in shape to a modern toucan, unlike any other known Mesozoic bird, with the surface texture of the bones indicating it was also covered by a keratinous beak. But despite this very “modern” face shape the bone arrangement was still much more similar to other enantiornitheans – there was a huge toothless maxilla making up the majority of the beak, with a small tooth-bearing premaxilla at the tip.

This suggests that there was more than one potential way for early birds to evolve modern-style beaks, and there may have been much more diversity in these animals’ facial structures than previously thought.

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