Dino card No. 1027 of 2,027

Lenesornis

Say it: len-ee-OR-nis

Name means: “Lena's bird”1

Ate: MeatEarly birdsLate Cretaceous

Lenesornis was a small, toothed bird that lived during the Late Cretaceous. It could fly and hunted for food on the ground. Fossils of this bird have been found in Uzbekistan.1 3

Lived

94 to 90 million years ago3

Late Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Bissekty Formation, Kyzyl Kum, Uzbekistan1 3

Food

Meat3

Length

0.1 to 0.99 m2

estimated from PBDB adult length range

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

How big was it?

How long was it?

as long as 2 house cats nose to tailas long as 6 bananas end to end

How big was Lenesornis compared to YOU?

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cool stuff

Fun facts

Lenesornis belonged to a group of ancient birds called enantiornithines, which had teeth and claws on their wings.1

It lived about 90 million years ago, during the Turonian stage of the Late Cretaceous.1 2

The first fossil of Lenesornis was originally thought to be from a different bird, Ichthyornis, before scientists reclassified it.1 3

Lenesornis was named by Russian paleontologist Evgeny Kurochkin in 1996.3

This bird was a ground dweller, spending much of its time walking and hunting on the land.3

AI-made picture of Lenesornis — An AI-made picture of how Lenesornis 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: Lenesornis
Named by: Kurochkin 19963
Group: Early birds
Family / clade: Alexornithidae3
Classification: Theropoda > Avialae3
Age of the rocks: 94 to 90 million years (Turonian)3
Rock formations: Bissekty3
Countries: Uzbekistan3
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database3
Discovery: Lenesornis was first described in 1986 by Lev Nesov as Ichthyornis maltshevskyi. In 1996, Evgeny Kurochkin renamed it Lenesornis after studying the fossils.1 3
Still debated: Scientists are not sure exactly how Lenesornis is related to other enantiornithine birds, as only a few fossils have been found.1

Where the facts come from

Lenesornis (en.wikipedia.org)
PBDB Taxon (paleobiodb.org)
Lenesornis 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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