New Delhi: A team of researchers from the Institute of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Palaeoanthropology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered two bird fossils in Jurassic rocks from the Fujian Province in southeast China. The rocks date to approximately 149 million years ago. The fossils fill a spatiotemporal gap in the record of early bird evolution, and provide evidence that birds diversified by the end of the Jurassic period. A paper describing the research has been published in Nature. Birds are the most diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates. Some macroevolutionary studies indicate that their earliest diversification occurred 145 million years........

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