A basal bird from the Campanian (Late Cretaceous) of Dinosaur Provincial Park (Alberta, Canada)

A fragmentary bone from Dinosaur Provincial Park, initially thought to belong to a pterosaur, has been reidentified as the distal end of a tibiotarsus from a basal bird, likely an enantiornithine. This discovery marks the first documentation of such a bird in the Dinosaur Park Formation and provides evidence that enantiornithines coexisted with more derived ornithurines in the high-latitude environments of Late Cretaceous western Canada. The reinterpretation was based on distinctive morphological characters, offering new insights into the avian diversity of this UNESCO World Heritage Site during the Campanian stage.

BUFFETAUT, E. (2010). A basal bird from the Campanian (Late Cretaceous) of Dinosaur Provincial Park (Alberta, Canada). Geological Magazine, 147(3), 469–472. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0016756810000129