Jan. 22, 2013 — In a paper published
in Nature Communications on January 22, 2013, a team of
paleontologists including Dr. Luis Chiappe, Director of the Natural History
Museum of Los Angeles County's (NHM) Dinosaur Institute, has discovered a way
to determine the sex of a prehistoric bird species.
Confuciusornis sanctus, a 125-million-year-old
Mesozoic bird, had remarkable differences in plumage -- some had long, almost
body length ornamental tail feathers, others had none -- features that have
been interpreted as the earliest example of avian courtship. However, the idea
that male Confuciusornis birds had ornamental plumage, and females
did not, has not been proven until now. Chiappe and the team studied hundreds
of Confuciusornis fossils unearthed from rocks deposited at the
bottom of ancient lakes in what is today northeastern China and found
undisputed evidence of the gender difference: medullary bone.
Chiappe conducted the study with Anusuya Chinsamy
of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, South
Africa; Jesús Marugán-Lobón of Madrid's Universidad Autonóma, Cantoblanco; Gao
Chunling and Zhang Fengjiao of the Dalian Natural History Museum in China.
"Our discovery provides the first case of
sex identification in an ancient bird, an animal closely related to dinosaurs,
such as the famous Velociraptor," said Chiappe. "When people visit
dinosaur exhibits, they often want to know if the skeletons are male or female.
We have nicknames like Thomas and Sue, but of all the thousands of skeletons of
dinosaurs or early birds found around the world, only the sex of a few has been
determined."
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