Chinese and American paleontologists, including Xing Lida, an associate professor at China Geo University, announced on the 22nd that they had discovered a number of special footprints in Assi province in northern Asturi and Lufeng in China. Footprints show that a strange ancient bird or bird-shaped dinosaur lived in these areas at the turn of Jurassic-Cretaceous. This discovery is of great significance for studying the distribution and evolution of late Mesozoic birds and dinosaur fauna in Europe and China.

It is reported that there is a very famous dinosaur fossil site near the Atlantic coast of Asturi province in northern Spain, where paleontologists found a large number of Jurassic animal and plant fossils 65.438+0.5 billion years ago. In 2002, the Spanish paleontologist Garcia-Ramos described some strange footprints from Assi, Asturi, but did not do further research. Unexpectedly, more than ten years later, similar footprints appeared in Yunnan, China.

Yunnan footprint is located in the back mountain of dinosaur valley museum, with a footprint length of 18.5 cm and a width of about 35 cm. Through the comparison of global footprint fossils, the researchers found that it is very consistent with Asturi Axi's unique footprint except for its different size. "We compared the footprints of these two batches in detail and realized that this is a brand-new footprint species." Xing Lida said.

Team Xing Lida named the Spanish specimen the Trident Footprint of Pi and the Yunnan specimen the Trident Footprint of Li's Slippery Slab. "The discovery of Peter's Trident footprint means that at the turn of Jurassic-Cretaceous, a very old shorebird lived on the coast of Spain, while in Lufeng Basin thousands of miles away, the sculptor of Lee's Trident footprint was a bigger animal, and their height might reach 1 m or even higher, which was a very huge ancient bird or bird-shaped dinosaur at that time." Martin Lockley, a famous footprinter, thinks.

Xing Lida said that at present, the vast majority of bird footprints in the world come from the Early Cretaceous, and there are very few records in the Late Jurassic. The new discoveries in Yunnan, Spain and China, as well as similar discoveries in Colorado, USA, mean that the early evolution of birds may be more complicated than expected, and a large-scale trend appeared very early.

The research was jointly completed by Xing Lida, Martin Lockley, curator of the Footprint Museum of the University of Colorado, and Dr. Anthony Luo Mirio, University of Queensland, Australia. This paper was published in Historical Biology.