The morning sun shines straight in from the mouth of the cave, and although it is not strong, it still wakes up the parrot-billed dragon Buni. It opened its eyes and stretched out to look at the bright light at the entrance of the cave. It seems that I can't sleep anymore, otherwise I'll be hungry again today. Buni thought, got up and prepared to climb outside the hole.
dinosaur
Several long-tailed and feathered Confucius birds were frolicking in the trees at the entrance of the cave, as usual. Bunney was always envious of them because it seemed to see them frolicking every day, but couldn't see when they were going to hunt. Bunney was not in a hurry to get out of the hole, and he had always been cautious and carefully checked the area around the hole before he came out of the hole.
Confucius Bird
Early morning is always the best time of the day, the sun slowly rising, the sun trying to shine through the layers of leaves to illuminate the lowest layer of the forest. Looking at the leaves overhead, and a glimmer of sunlight, Bunney felt the breeze pass through the hairs on the surface of his body. It still prefers the expansive feel of the outside, where it can run as much as it wants without having to curl up in a narrow cave. Buni ran down his familiar path deep into the forest, where he could no longer enjoy the breeze, and he had to hurry to find something to eat, otherwise, he did not know when he would become the prey of the enemy. In this forest, there are always bloody battles, and sometimes Bunney feels tired, but survival is like that, it knows.
early morning
Bunney trotted for a while and stopped under a ginkgo tree because it found quite a few newly sprouted ferns, and these tender green leaves were very tasty for Bunney, and just looking at Bunney was already drooling. Buoney was close to these fresh leaves, and its hard parrot-billed beak easily cut off the plant's rhizome as soon as it opened and closed. In just a few moments, a large bunch of leaves went into Bunney's belly.
fern
Bunney relaxed and buried his head in preparation to continue enjoying the ferns. But just then, it heard the sound again. This time, Bunney identified the source of the sound, right above it. Buni immediately raised his head and followed the sound, but before he could look up, a blue shadow fell from the sky, and he felt a sharp pain in his back, as if pierced by a sharp weapon.
Buni immediately realized that he had been attacked, put down the food in his mouth, and ran forward desperately. The blue shadow did not launch a second attack on Bunney, it just followed Bunney some distance away. Just as Buni was running far away, thinking that he had escaped the enemy's attack, he suddenly felt weak and breathless, and fell to the ground.
Hundreds of millions of years later, in the summer of 1998, The man who killed Booney was discovered.
At that time, it was a big event in the sports world, and during the football World Cup, the whole world was immersed in the carnival of the World Cup, and football became the hottest topic. In a small remote mountain village in northeast China, a group of expeditions from Beijing are fighting at the stones in the mountains, as if the outside world has little to do with themselves. This small mountain village, called Sihetun, is located in Beipiao City, Liaoning Province, and is surrounded by nothing special except crop fields and rocky hills, but in the eyes of experts from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, these stones are their treasures. The whole field trip did not go well, and the continuous light rain made it impossible to complete the finishing work.
Dinosaur fossils
On June 24, when the whole expedition was about to end, a dojo storm came unexpectedly. A bolt of lightning swept across the gloomy sky, and trees swayed left and right in the strong wind. In the morning, after the rain passed and the work was carried out in an orderly manner, the scientific expedition team focused on the collection pit of the mountain beam in the north of the village. Maybe it was the last day of the relationship, and everyone was working hard, and the rock formations were peeling off much faster than usual.
At about 10 o'clock in the morning, the team members began to find signs of fossils in the rock fragments dug up, and it seemed that this place was not far from the fossil enrichment layer. So everyone slowed down the digging speed and began to carefully examine each rock they were dealing with. Li Mengfang, a member of the expedition team, carefully cleaned the rock formation where the fossils appeared, and just where the brush swept, a black-gray shale caught his eye. Li Mengfang stopped, lowered her body and carefully observed, revealing an animal mark on the rock that had just been cleaned. Although the overall outline cannot be seen clearly, its head and a row of small machete-like teeth on it can be recognized, and some black marks on the side appear to be feathers! Li Mengfang was excited, and he immediately told everyone about his discovery.
The main personnel of the scientific expedition team quickly gathered around, and the rock containing the fossil was carefully removed, and a feathered dinosaur fossil specimen appeared in front of everyone, and the crowd suddenly burst into cheers, knowing that this is the first dinosaur fossil with feathers excavated by Chinese paleontologists, which has important historical significance in the entire paleontological community.
Chinese Bird Dragon
After the discovery of this precious fossil, Chinese paleontologists Xu Li, Wang Xiaolin and Wu Xiaochun began to study it, and the relevant research paper was published in the September 1999 issue of the journal Nature, and the new species was named Chinese bird dragon. It is currently stored in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, China.
Chinese bird dragon, the scientific name means "lizard like a bird from China", the Chinese bird dragon model species is named Millennium Chinese bird dragon. To commemorate the coming millennium, the Chinese bird dragon lived in northeast China 125 million years ago in the Cretaceous, a small feathered dinosaur of the chilong family, whose fossils were found in the Yixian Formation of the Rehe biota in western Liaoning, China.
Rehe biota
The Chinese bird dragon is 1 m long, 0.4 m high, weighs 5 kg, and is a carnivorous dinosaur with a light structure. Because the fossils found are relatively complete, we have the opportunity to study the structure of the Chinese ornithischia more carefully, so as to have an accurate understanding of its morphology, tectonics and physiology. The Chinese ornithischiosaurus had a large head, 14 cm long, and the proportion of skulls in the body was greater than that of most other dinosaurs in the family Chilongae. The skull of the Chinese ornithischiosaur has a slender beak and a swollen brain, and its nostrils, anterior orbital foramen and orbit are large, and the entire skull is triangular from the side. The large eye socket not only indicates that the Chinese bird dragon is a pair of large eyes, but also the large number of optic nerves contained in it may indicate that it has a certain night vision ability.
The Chinese ornithischians had small dagger-shaped teeth in their mouths and serrated joint hind edges, a structure that could be used to cut through the skin of prey. The neck of the Chinese bird dragon is slender and consists of 10 cervical vertebrae. Its forelimbs are located on both sides of the trunk, and its femur, radius, and ulna are about the same length, of which the finger claws alone occupy 1/3 of the entire forelimb. The tail of the Chinese ornithischiosaurus is composed of 24 tail vertebrae, and its tail has a pronounced tendon structure, which can strengthen the stability of the tail and facilitate the control of direction and balance.
The preciousness of chinese bird fossils is that the feather structure is clearly preserved, except for the lower part of the hind limbs, almost the entire skull, trunk, limbs, and tail are distributed with fibrous primitive feathers, but short feathers with feather shafts are preserved locally near the forelimbs. After measuring the length of these feathers, the researchers listed data such as 2 cm for the head, 3 cm for the neck, and more than 5 cm for the shoulders, hind limbs, and exorcism. The feathers of the Chinese bird dragon do not have the secondary branches and feather branches that modern birds have, and the feathers on their bodies are more used for heat preservation and glory, and do not have the ability to fly.
At this point, it seems that the story of The Chinese bird and dragon is coming to an end, but a study in late 2009 has once again made it the focus of the paleontological community and the entire world. If you have seen the movie "Jurassic Park", then you must remember the fierce and vicious double crested dragon, we will not discuss whether its design is scientific, just its spray of poison will make the audience eye-opening.
Jurassic Park
Dinosaurs used venom, which used to be just something made up by science fiction writers. But on December 21, 2009, the electronic edition of the National Academy of Sciences newspaper reported the latest study by a Sino-American research team led by Gong Enpu, a professor at Northeastern University in China: the poisonous teeth of the Chinese bird dragon, which lived 125 million years ago in Western Liaoning, China, and it was the first species found to use venom and poisonous fangs in the dinosaur family. It seems that this seems to be a great foreknowledge of Jurassic Park, but they have mistaken the protagonist.
The discovery of poisonous teeth in Chinese birds and dragons was accidental. In 2007, when Gong Enpu and others studied the differentiation of the Chilong family, they accidentally found that the slender and long teeth of the Chinese bird dragon had grooves. The teeth of the Chinese bird dragon are sharp and curved backwards, and the teeth have a groove that runs through the full teeth. Gong Enpu said: "These teeth are very long, like swords, and look like the poisonous fangs of a snake." Bornheim said they found not only grooved teeth, but also other structures on the skull, which may hide venom glands in the grooves of the upper palate, through the grooves used to deliver venom, and a venom that can enter the area of the tooth with grooves.
Bornheim said the structure is similar to that of posterior groove-toothed venomous snakes and venomous lizards. Bryan Fry, a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, published a paper in early 2000 saying he found poisonous glands in the mouth of a Comodo dragon. Bornheim said that Frey's research gave him a great inspiration: "We saw an article that said that komodo dragons were poisonous and iguanas were poisonous, so I suddenly realized that the grooves in the palates of the Chinese bird dragons were used for this purpose."
Of course, others have different views on this study, some people think that the grooves in the teeth of the Chinese bird dragon are used to bleed the prey, and some people think that those grooves are the growth channels when the new teeth replace the old teeth. Regarding the venom used by the Chinese bird dragon, most people believe that it is a neurological venom that acts on the blood. Whether or not the Chinese bird dragon has a poisonous tooth structure, it provides new thinking for paleontological research.