Dino card No. 1432 of 2,027

Piscivorenantiornis

Say it: PISS-ih-vor-en-AN-tee-OR-nis

Name means: “fish-eating enantiornithine bird”1

Ate: FishEarly birdsEarly Cretaceous

Piscivorenantiornis was a tiny bird that lived in China about 120 million years ago. It loved eating fish and could even cough up a pellet of fish bones, just like some birds do today!1 2

Lived

121 to 113 million years ago4

Early Cretaceous

Fossils found in

Liaoning, China1 2

Food

Fish1

When did it live?

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

252 million years ago20114566, the asteroid

cool stuff

Fun facts

It is the first known fish-eating enantiornithine bird.1

The first fossil was found with a neat pile of fish bones in its stomach area, probably a pellet it was about to spit out.1

Its pelvis (hip bones) was completely fused together, which is rare for early Cretaceous birds. Only a couple of other enantiornithines share this feature.2

The sternum (breastbone) had special prongs at the front that most other enantiornithines lack.1

One of the bones in its neck had a weird shape: it was curved up and down on one side and side to side on the other. No other bird has that.3

A second skeleton of this bird was found in 2020, giving scientists more clues about how it lived.1

It lived during the Aptian age, about 121 to 113 million years ago.4

AI-made picture of Piscivorenantiornis — An AI-made picture of how Piscivorenantiornis 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: Piscivorenantiornis
Named by: Wang and Zhou 20174
Group: Early birds
Family / clade: Enantiornithes4
Classification: Theropoda > Avialae4
Age of the rocks: 121 to 113 million years (Aptian)4
Rock formations: Jiufotang4
Countries: China4
Fossil records: 1 in the Paleobiology Database4
Discovery: The first fossil was found near Dapingfang in Liaoning, China. It was named Piscivorenantiornis inusitatus by Wang, Zhou and Sullivan in 2016.1
Still debated: Scientists are still unsure why the neck vertebra has such a strange shape, unlike any other bird.3

Where the facts come from

Piscivorenantiornis (en.wikipedia.org)
Insight into the growth pattern and bone fusion of basal birds from an Early Cretaceous enantiornithine bird | PNAS (pnas.org)
[dinosaur] Piscivorenantiornis, new fish-eating enantiornithine bird from Early Cretaceous of China (reptilis.net)
Piscivorenantiornis 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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