Re: Crop for seed-eating found in Hongshanornis and Sapeornis

[Tim Williams <tijawi@gmail.com>]

bh480@scn.org> wrote:

> Crop for seed-eating found in Hongshanornis and Sapeornis
>
> The official article has not been posted yet on the
> Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences website.
> Here are links to a couple of articles about the findings.
>
> http://english.peopledaily.com.cn/202936/7589247.html


The article states:  "The authors also identified a muscular gizzard
in _Hongshanornis_, giving it essentially a modern avian digestive
system. _Sapeornis_ and _Hongshanornis_ are two evolutionarily distant
lineages, indicating that their crops evolved independently as a
specialized seed-eating adaptation, the authors report."


I'm very much looking forward to this paper.  For one thing, it will
presumably address why the crop didn't just evolved once in a common
ancestor of _Sapeornis_ and _Hongshanornis_, instead of evolving
independently.  After all, _Jeholornis_, which had a crop for
seed-eating, was basal to both sapeornithids (omnivoropterygids) and
hongshanornithids.


Anyway, I'll W4TP before shooting my mouth off.






Cheers

Tim