If you were to glance up at tree canopies 120 million years ago in what is now northeastern China, you might have caught sight of a birdlike creature about the size of a crow.
The world’s first flying dinosaurs stayed aloft with a different muscle system than today’s birds, an international team of scientists has confirmed using advances in laser technology. The team said the early birds used their shoulder muscles to lift their wings and used chest muscles to depress them, unlike modern birds that use only their chest to power their flight.
Piecing together the crushed skull of a fossil bird that lived alongside the dinosaurs helped researchers extrapolate what its brain would have looked like: big olfactory bulbs would have meant that this bird, the earliest known animal to eat fruit, had a better sense of smell than most modern birds