Some 150 million years ago, Europe was tropical — and mostly underwater. The entire continent was closer to the equator than it is today, and what is now Germany and its neighbouring countries was submerged under a shallow inland sea, dotted with islands.
‘Weird’ dinosaur prompts rethink of bird evolution
On one cluster of islands, there were unusual creatures that didn’t fit in with the rest of the fauna. These were some of the earliest birds on the planet: about the size of crows, with black feathers, and probably partial to eating insects. They weren’t great fliers, spending most of their time on the ground and occasionally flapping into the air — perhaps to escape sneaking predators1. They also didn’t look like modern birds. They had teeth in their jaws and claws at the ends of their wings — features seen on no adult birds today. These German animals were Archaeopteryx, and they bore many traces of their dinosaur ancestors.
Fossils of Archaeopteryx are some of the most famous in history, but this creature is also an enigma. For more than a century, Archaeopteryx has been the only known bird genus from the Jurassic: the period when birds first evolved. Many other dinosaur-era birds have been discovered over the past few decades, but they are all from the subsequent period, the Cretaceous: a time when many diverse types of bird lived around the world. The group’s origins remained lost in time.
Now, researchers finally have a second genus of Jurassic birds. Baminornis, discovered in China and described in February 2025, instantly expanded scientists’ knowledge of the earliest birds. Baminornis is unlike Archaeopteryx, hinting at a complex evolutionary story. In parallel, the description of a remarkably well-preserved Archaeopteryx specimen, which had remained hidden for decades, has shed unprecedented light on the first birds. Finds such as these are revealing clues about how and why birds evolved, and whether they evolved powered flight just once or many times during the age of the dinosaurs.
From ground to air
Today, birds are one of the most successful and diverse animal groups, with about 10,000 known species2. They vary from minuscule hummingbirds that can hover in mid-air to great voyagers such as the wandering albatross, top predators such as golden eagles and large flightless creatures such as emus.
Over the past half century, researchers have established that birds evolved from dinosaurs: specifically, the theropods, the group that includes the turkey-sized Velociraptor and the towering Allosaurus.
However, reconstructing the evolutionary history of birds has proved remarkably tricky. “Birds and bird-like dinosaurs are super rare in the fossil record,” says Jingmai O’Connor, a palaeontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.
Blame anatomy for their rarity. “Birds, generally, are small and they have delicate, hollow bones and lightweight skeletons,” says Stephen Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. This means that their bones are more likely to be broken and crushed in rough environments, such as fast-flowing rivers, in which a large skeleton, such as that of a Tyrannosaurus rex, might survive.
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