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Junornis

Say it: JOO-nor-nis
Name means: “beautiful bird”1
Ate: MeatEarly birdsEarly Cretaceous

Junornis was a tiny bird that lived about 126 million years ago in what is now China. It had long tail feathers and was a great flier, able to zip through the air like a modern sparrow.1

Lived
126 to 120 million years ago4
Early Cretaceous
Fossils found in
Inner Mongolia, China1
Food
Meat2
Wingspan
0.3057 m1
Weight
0.0304 kg1

When did it live?

Triassic
Jurassic
Cretaceous
252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How wide were its wings?

Junornis wings about 0.3057 m tip to tipA house cat about 0.5 mA dog about 1 mA bicycle about 1.8 m

How heavy was it?

as heavy as 0.5 bananas
lighter than a house cat

How big was Junornis compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

1

Junornis weighed only about 30 grams, which is about the same as a modern sparrow.1

2

Its wings were short and broad, like those of a skylark, which helped it take off quickly.1

3

Junornis could fly using a bounding flight style, flapping its wings in bursts and then gliding with wings folded, just like many small birds today.1

4

It had a pair of long, ribbon-like tail feathers, which were probably used for display.1

5

Junornis is the first enantiornithine bird found in Inner Mongolia, showing that these birds lived across a wide area of China.1

6

Its fossils were found in the Yixian Formation, which is about 126 million years old.1

AI-madeAI-made picture of Junornis
An AI-made picture of how Junornis 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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Scientific name
Junornis
Named by
Liu et al. 20174
Group
Early birds
Family / clade
Enantiornithes4
Classification
Theropoda > Avialae4
Age of the rocks
126 to 120 million years (Barremian / Aptian)4
Rock formations
Yixian4
Countries
China4
Fossil records
1 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery
Junornis was named in 2017 by Liu Di and colleagues. The fossil was found at Liutiaogou village in Inner Mongolia, China, and is housed at the Beijing Museum of Natural History.13

Where the facts come from

  1. Flight aerodynamics in enantiornithines: Information from a new Chinese Early Cretaceous bird | PLOS One (journals.plos.org)
  2. PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
  3. Junornis (en.wikipedia.org)
  4. Junornis 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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