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Deviation Actions
Description
124,600,000 years ago, Early Cretaceous (earliest Aptian), Beipiao, Liaoning, China,
The Emperor enjoys the toiletry services of a flock of Longirostravis hani. Longirostravis was a canary-sized enantiornithine bird notable for its elongate snout, tipped with conical teeth.
Although the original description suggests a sandpiper-like wading lifestyle, I am not convinced of this. Longi' has the feet and claws of a perching bird, while the dentition suggests that it did not feed like modern wading charadriiform birds - these use a tongue-based water pump to quickly suck up prey from wet substrate. The long teeth of Longi' would rupture the surface tension of the water droplet around the food item and the poor bird would have to muck around in the mud to get the sticky shrimp down the throat.
Instead I envisage the Longirostravis and it's longipterygid kin as arboreal birds, using their toothed bills as tweesers to access bugs in all sorts of hard to get places - a lifestyle broadly similar to the dendrocolaptine woodcreepers of South America.
An adult Yutyrannus, with an 8 metre long feathered body, would have provided a smorgasbord of ticks, lice and giant fleas (up to an inch in length!) for an enterprising bird, that these Longirostravis are taking full advantage of.
Note that most of the Yutyrannus skull images circulating online are of ELDM V1001 which represents the smallest and most gracile of the 3 Yuty' heads. The Emperor's facial contours are based on the holotype's (ZCDM V5000) somewhat mangled 90.5 cm long skull which represents a much larger and robust animal with a deeper snout profile. I've also exaggerated this a bit by building up rugosities on the chin and snout.
Lianhai Hou, LuisM. Chiappe, Fucheng Zhang and Cheng-Ming Chuong (2004). "New Early Cretaceous fossil from China documents a novel trophic specialization for Mesozoic birds". Naturwissenschaften 91 (1): 22–25. doi:10.1007/s00114-003-0489-1.
The Emperor enjoys the toiletry services of a flock of Longirostravis hani. Longirostravis was a canary-sized enantiornithine bird notable for its elongate snout, tipped with conical teeth.
Although the original description suggests a sandpiper-like wading lifestyle, I am not convinced of this. Longi' has the feet and claws of a perching bird, while the dentition suggests that it did not feed like modern wading charadriiform birds - these use a tongue-based water pump to quickly suck up prey from wet substrate. The long teeth of Longi' would rupture the surface tension of the water droplet around the food item and the poor bird would have to muck around in the mud to get the sticky shrimp down the throat.
Instead I envisage the Longirostravis and it's longipterygid kin as arboreal birds, using their toothed bills as tweesers to access bugs in all sorts of hard to get places - a lifestyle broadly similar to the dendrocolaptine woodcreepers of South America.
An adult Yutyrannus, with an 8 metre long feathered body, would have provided a smorgasbord of ticks, lice and giant fleas (up to an inch in length!) for an enterprising bird, that these Longirostravis are taking full advantage of.
Note that most of the Yutyrannus skull images circulating online are of ELDM V1001 which represents the smallest and most gracile of the 3 Yuty' heads. The Emperor's facial contours are based on the holotype's (ZCDM V5000) somewhat mangled 90.5 cm long skull which represents a much larger and robust animal with a deeper snout profile. I've also exaggerated this a bit by building up rugosities on the chin and snout.
Lianhai Hou, LuisM. Chiappe, Fucheng Zhang and Cheng-Ming Chuong (2004). "New Early Cretaceous fossil from China documents a novel trophic specialization for Mesozoic birds". Naturwissenschaften 91 (1): 22–25. doi:10.1007/s00114-003-0489-1.
Image size
2362x1615px 1.13 MB
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yooo they got passed the boof