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Gobipipus

Say it: GO-bee-PIE-pus

Name means: “Gobi Desert chick”1

Ate: MeatEarly birdsLate Cretaceous

Gobipipus was a tiny bird that lived during the time of dinosaurs. It is known from an embryo fossil, so scientists think it was still inside an egg when it died. This little bird belonged to a group called enantiornithines, which were the most common birds of the Cretaceous period.1 2

Lived

84 to 72 million years ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Barun Goyot Formation, Gobi Desert, Mongolia1 3

Food

Meat2

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

Gobipipus is only known from an incomplete embryo fossil, which means it was a baby bird that never hatched.1

It lived about 80 to 76 million years ago, during the Campanian stage of the Late Cretaceous.1

Gobipipus belonged to a group called Enantiornithes, which were the dominant birds of the Cretaceous and had teeth in their beaks.1 2

The fossil was found by a joint Russian-Mongolian expedition in the Gobi Desert.1

Gobipipus was a ground-dwelling bird that could probably fly, but scientists are not sure how well.2

AI-made picture of Gobipipus — An AI-made picture of how Gobipipus might have looked, made by a computer from what scientists know. It is a guess: the real animal may have looked different, and nobody knows its true colours.

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For dino experts

Scientific name: Gobipipus
Named by: Kurochkin et al. 20133
Group: Early birds
Family / clade: Enantiornithes3
Classification: Theropoda > Avialae3
Age of the rocks: 84 to 72 million years (Campanian)3
Rock formations: Baruungoyot3
Countries: Mongolia3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Gobipipus was named in 2013 by Kurochkin, Chatterjee, and Mikhailov based on an embryo fossil found in the Barun Goyot Formation of Mongolia.1 3
Still debated: Scientists are not sure what the adult Gobipipus looked like or how big it grew, because only an embryo has been found.1

Where the facts come from

Gobipipus (en.wikipedia.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Gobipipus in The Paleobiology Database (CC BY 4.0): age, places, rock formations, classification.

Every fact on this page has a number that points to its source. If we got something wrong, sorry, we are dino fans, not a science journal. Tell us at [email protected] and we will fix it.

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