Dino card No. 0818 of 2,027

Hongshanornis

Say it: hong-SHAN-or-niss

Name means: “Hongshan bird, after the Hongshan culture of ancient China”1

Ate: MeatEarly birdsEarly Cretaceous

Hongshanornis was a small, beaked bird that lived near lakes and marshes in Early Cretaceous China. It had long legs for wading in shallow water and a slender beak for catching fish or bugs. This bird is one of the earliest known beaked ornithurine birds, a group that includes modern birds.1

Lived

126 to 120 million years ago4

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Inner Mongolia and Liaoning, China2 1

Food

Meat1

Length

0.2 to 0.3 m1

estimated from small size described as a small bird

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Hongshanornis had a beak in both its upper and lower jaws, making it the earliest known beaked ornithurine bird.1

This bird had a predentary bone in its lower jaw, a feature once thought unique to ornithischian dinosaurs.1

Hongshanornis lived about 125 to 120 million years ago, during the Early Cretaceous period.2

Its long legs and short, less curved claws show it was a wading bird, not a tree-dweller.1

One fossil of Hongshanornis preserved gizzard stones (gastroliths), which helped it grind up food.3

Hongshanornis was originally thought to be toothless, but later studies found it had small teeth in both jaws.3

AI-made picture of Hongshanornis — An AI-made picture of how Hongshanornis 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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Myth buster

Myth: Hongshanornis was completely toothless like modern birds.

Truth: Scientists now know it had small teeth in both upper and lower jaws, though it also had a beak.3

For dino experts

Scientific name: Hongshanornis
Named by: Zhou and Zhang 20054
Group: Early birds
Family / clade: Hongshanornithidae4
Classification: Theropoda > Avialae4
Age of the rocks: 126 to 120 million years (Barremian / Aptian)4
Rock formations: Yixian4
Countries: China4
Fossil records: 2 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery: Hongshanornis was named by Zhou and Zhang in 2005. The first fossil, a nearly complete skeleton with feathers, was found in the Yixian Formation at Shifo, Ningcheng, Inner Mongolia, China.1 2
Still debated: Scientists still debate whether Hongshanornis was more closely related to modern birds than toothed ornithurines, or if teeth were lost several times in early bird evolution.1

Where the facts come from

Discovery of an ornithurine bird and its implication for Early Cretaceous avian radiation | PNAS (pnas.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Hongshanornis (en.wikipedia.org)
Hongshanornis 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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