Talk:Asteriornis

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Graphics ? Illustrations ?[edit]

Another article about an extinct animal based on one fossil - - - another skull.

Since "everything" rests on the skull, would it be too much to ask for to have a photo, picture, drawing, or illustration of some kind of the skull?

Just curious. 2600:8800:784:8F00:C23F:D5FF:FEC4:D51D (talk) 05:43, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately the paper is not open access. I would have added illustrations if they were not under stringent copyright laws. If you want to see the skull, CT scans and photos are present in numerous news articles about the find. Fanboyphilosopher (talk) 15:01, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Map ?[edit]

A map showing the location of the Maastricht Formation would be nice to show where the fossils are located (being a map of the entire formation, it would also preclude fossil plundering, as it isn't a specific site) -- 67.70.32.186 (talk) 23:59, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I am not aware of any open-access maps of the Maastricht Formation. If I knew of one, I would have put it in the article.Fanboyphilosopher (talk) 01:04, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've added some geographical information. These are very large commercial marl quarries that are regularly visited by parties of collectors.--MWAK (talk) 08:17, 31 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion of WP:ITN blurb at WP:ERRORS[edit]

There was a long discussion of the entry made in the ITN main page section for this topic. As this contains lots of good background and detail which might otherwise be lost, I'm copying it here for the record. I'll close the copied part so it's clear but editors might append further discussion if there's more to say. Andrew🐉(talk) 12:19, 22 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Cleared as resolved from WP:ERRORS
Again, this story is journalistic hype about a "superchicken" supported by just a single paper and a single specimen. The issue here is "the oldest evidence of modern birds" but the Nature paper doesn't seem to be making this claim. It says

Here we report a new Mesozoic fossil that occupies a position close to the last common ancestor of Galloanserae and fills a key phylogenetic gap in the early evolutionary history of crown birds ... The fossil represents one of the only well-supported crown birds from the Mesozoic era12, and is the first Mesozoic crown bird with well-represented cranial remains.

This seems to be saying that they have found similar specimens already but that this is a good one which "fills a gap". The claimed dating is "66.8–66.7 million years ago".

As counter-examples for the claim, see

  • Aves:Fossil Record – a general survey which provides good context
  • Confuciusornis – "the oldest known bird to have a beak", which was about 120 million years old
  • Vegavis – "the first definitive physical proof that representatives of some of the groups of modern birds lived in the Mesozoic". The dating for that specimen is "66–68 million years ago".

The general mistake here is to suppose that papers in Nature and the corresponding journalist coverage are reliable sources but really aren't. Many of the papers turn out to be wrong or overblown while journalistic coverage of anything is notoriously unreliable because it will tend to exaggerate and sensationalise.

As a quick fix, pending further discussion, I suggest trimming the claim of "the oldest" to give

Andrew🐉(talk) 10:41, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

I would remove the second comma in this case (so "evidence of modern birds dating to the Mesozoic era"), otherwise it's a bit odd to parse. —Nizolan (talk · c.) 12:17, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
  • I was trying to keep the proposal simple but agree that it reads better without the comma and so have amended the proposed revision as Nizolan suggests. Andrew🐉(talk) 12:28, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The technical details have been simplified for the blurb, but there is no sensationalism going on here. Following the discussion in Field et al. (2020), the significance of Asteriornis is that it is the oldest crown bird - that is, a bird descended from the common ancestor of all birds living today, which fall in the taxonomic grouping known as Neornithes. Confuciusornis is not a member of Neornithes, and you will notice in the article that nowhere is it called a "modern" bird.
Meanwhile, Vegavis may appear to weaken the paper's claim, but that is because the article for Vegavis itself is lacking. While initially proposed to be a member of the Neornithes, in recent years there is increasing evidence from phylogenetic analysis that this may not be the case (including this paper). Either way, Asteriornis is older than Vegavis, if only marginally - Asteriornis is firmly dated to 66.8-66.7 Ma (million years old), while Vegavis is firmly dated to 66.5 Ma.
Article author Fanboyphilosopher may have more to add. Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 16:48, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The most important line in the blurb is "the oldest evidence of modern birds". This phrase is simplified but not incorrect, as Asteriornis is indeed the oldest definitive fossil of a modern bird. To elaborate, by "modern bird" we mean Neornithes, the crown group of birds which contains living groups of birds but not "primitive" types which possessed teeth, wing claws, or long bony tails. Vegavis was also publicized as the oldest modern bird when it was discovered, but this was based on various fragmented bones and its classification is considered more controversial nowadays. This is the case with many purported early Neornithes, which are characterized by fragmentary material and uncertain dating. Asteriornis does not have that problem, as it is known from complete skull material which clearly shows its relations with the bird subgroup containing chickens and ducks. In addition, its antiquity is well constrained to 66.7-66.8 Ma compared to Vegavis which was recently calibrated as 66.5 Ma. These factors combine to justify the importance of its discovery. Confuciusornis is not a modern bird and is irrelevant to this discussion, since it retained large wing claws and convergently evolved a beak. The UCMP Berkeley link is a bit antiquated, note that it does not cite anything newer than 1995. I should also clarify that the discovery of Asteriornis was not entirely unexpected, genetic evidence has estimated that modern birds were well-established during the Mesozoic and the aforementioned fragmentary material had primed us for fossil discoveries. Perhaps a good replacement blurb would be:
  • The phrase "oldest definitive species of modern bird" seems too technical and the concept of a "modern bird" seems to be a fairly obscure matter of cladistics – a science which is quite tentative and subject to change. Much older species such as Confuciusornis had wings and a beak and that would be enough for most people. Wing claws can still be found in present species such as the hoatzin and so don't seem a major issue.
But, if we accept that we're just talking about the crown group, the datings are still quite tentative and the margin of error seems too great to be claiming that the new species is 66.7 Mya while Vegavis is 66.5 and so that tiny difference of .2 Mya is enough to claim a new record. Here's a detailed paper about such dating: Phylogenetically vetted and stratigraphically constrained fossil calibrations within Aves. This explains the difficulty of accurate aging as this is matter of dating and lining up strata and then allowing for the offset of the fossil specimen, which might be tens of metres deeper than the dated stratum. That paper gives the 66.5 Mya age for Vegavis as a minimum because there's more than one way to date it and another dating gives a significantly greater age of 67.5 Mya. When datings can vary by millions of years, the ages in question seem too close to call. This doesn't seem to be settled science and so we shouldn't be publishing splash headlines every time someone finds another bone and makes a bold claim for it.
Andrew🐉(talk) 18:57, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I've reworded based on Fanboyphilosopher's wording (plus added link at mondern bird). --Floquenbeam (talk) 19:44, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
@Andrew, Some of your comments make it sound like you think Asteriornis's importance is artificially inflated by sensationalism, and I just want to elaborate on why I consider that opinion incongruent with reality. Asteriornis is an animal which ornithologists and paleontologists have been eagerly anticipating for decades. It's a neornithean known from well-preserved fossils that lived prior to the K-Pg extinction. That is a huge deal. We knew pre-Cenozoic neornitheans existed, but we simply did not have enough helpful fossil material to say anything about the origin of birds as we know them today. Vegavis and various other birds may or may not have been neornitheans, but they are too controversial and/or too fragmentary to help resolve major paleontological debates. We still don't know exactly why neornitheans were the only dinosaurs to survive the extinction when every other group (including all other birds) went extinct. Asteriornis is definitive, well-preserved fossil evidence that can be used to solve that huge paleontological puzzle, along with other puzzles about the origin and early diversification of birds in their modern form. I am fully aware of the fact that it's not the oldest bird-like animal ("bird" is more-or-less a spectrum once dinosaurs are considered), yet it is still a fossil important for understanding the evolutionary advantages of modern birds compared to pre-modern birds and other dinosaurs. The age is relatively unimportant, we know via genetics that Neornithes originated at least 15 million years prior to Asteriornis. But that doesn't change the fact that the fossil itself is among the biggest paleontological discoveries of the year thus far. Fanboyphilosopher (talk) 20:35, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
This still doesn't seem to be more than an incremental extension of existing knowledge – the main new aspects seem to be that this was found in Europe rather than the southern hemisphere and it's more clearly at the fork between chickens and ducks. It's easy to find similar gushing about Vegavis. For example, when a paper about that appeared in Nature in 2016, we got similar news coverage such this

"The bones themselves are a really important fossil – they are one of the oldest good skeletons of a modern-style bird, and confirm that some of the bird groups that around today, like ducks and geese, were also living with the dinosaurs" ... But the discovery also offers a new perspective on soundscape that would have existed more than 66 million years ago. "It tells us that these early birds living alongside the dinosaurs may have sounded like some of the birds around today," Brusatte said. "If [we] were standing back in the late Cretaceous, during that calm before the asteroid hit and wiped out the dinosaurs, the air may have been filled with the songs, chirps, and honks of birds!"

Anyway, my beef remains that the age of Vegavis is much the same as Asteriornis – both are about 66+ Mya and so we shouldn't be focussing on this issue of age as if some big jump had been made. For comparison, see a recent discovery of some fossilised green seaweed, which pushed back the age for that group by about 200 million years. The pattern of coverage in that case is much the same – a fossil is found and a paper is written. The PR department of the university then writes a press release which puffs it up and the media then repeat this uncritically. It's good that we cover this but we should watch out for another bird too – the peacock! Andrew🐉(talk) 22:27, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
To step back to make sure to understand that this was not just media hype, consider that the NYTimes in their coverage spoke to several other experts in the field but not tied to their research who considered this a very significant find [1], and that alongside the publication of the article in Nature a wholly separate piece by an unaffiliated author explained why this was a very significant find. [2]. This was not "Oh, look 'wonderchicken' that looks great in headlines particularly at a time like this!". There's scientific reason, that we as WP authors should not be questioning why the science community is excited about this. When the media only is excited, yes, we should be careful because media hype, but science rarely engages in hype. --Masem (t) 22:47, 20 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I should clarify that people were gushing about Vegavis in 2016 because it had the oldest voicebox preserved in the fossil record. And I'll repeat what I said: Asteriornis is not important because of its age. It's important because it helps us understand what neornitheans were doing prior to the extinction. Vegavis is not universally considered a neornithean and therefore it is much less useful for studying extinction, diversification, and ecological patterns at the origin of modern birds. I am honestly frustrated by the whole age debate, it's a trivial matter not worth being fixated on. What is important is that Asteriornis is the first definitive fossil of a Mesozoic neornithean. Our blurb does not care about whether it is 66.7 or 66.5 million years old, just that it "lived at the Mesozoic era", i.e. prior to the K-Pg extinction. Also, Andrew, I am quite annoyed and honestly a bit offended by your assertions that paleontological studies published in Nature should never be considered reliable sources. I can agree that some Nature papers are heavily flawed (just look at the recent Oculudentavis debacle), but it's honestly very rude and needlessly argumentative to assert that all of them are without proper arguments to support your perspective. You started this discussion under the pretense that Asteriornis is some run-of-the-mill skull exaggerated by the media ("Again, this story is journalistic hype"), and evidently I haven't done a good job convincing you otherwise. Maybe you would like to hear from one of the paper's authors, who is an editor here. Pinging Albertonykus. Just try to stay civil in this discussion and not throw around wild accusations. Fanboyphilosopher (talk) 00:55, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
I'll add that Brusatte himself also commented on the significance of Asteriornis with a superlative which clearly identifies it as being much more important: [3] Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 01:05, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Greetings. As Fanboyphilosopher mentioned, I am one of the authors on the Asteriornis paper (specifically the third author listed). I would summarize the scientific significance of Asteriornis as follows:
  1. It is one of the oldest convincing fossils of modern birds (neornitheans). It is true that it is (at best) only slightly older than Vegavis. However, as noted in our study, the precise relationship of Vegavis to modern birds is controversial. Due to its more completely known skull, Asteriornis exhibits clear hallmarks of the chicken+duck lineage, and its neornithean status is likely to be more secure. Furthermore, the paucity of Cretaceous neornithean fossils is such that any well-corroborated discovery of one is going to be a big deal in our field—prior to the discovery of Asteriornis, Vegavis was essentially the only widely accepted example.
  2. Speaking of the skull, Asteriornis unambiguously preserves the oldest nearly complete neornithean skull known. (Only fragments from the skull of Vegavis have been reported in scientific literature so far.) It is also one of the best-preserved avian skulls in the fossil record—most complete fossil bird skulls are preserved crushed flat, whereas this one has most of the three-dimensional anatomy still discernible.
  3. It provides an unprecedented look at the probable morphology of the last common ancestor of the duck and chicken lineages, making it highly informative for understanding the origins of this culturally significant group of birds. Prior to the discovery of Asteriornis, there were no known fossils that were well-supported candidates for representing the ancestral state of these birds, and modern representatives of the group are so divergent in their anatomy that it would have been difficult for us to get a clear picture of their ancestral features based on extant species alone.
  4. As has been correctly noted in this conversation, the fact that it is one of the oldest neornitheans and yet found in the Northern Hemisphere challenges a longstanding and somewhat popular hypothesis that modern birds originated in the south.
  5. It exhibits evidence of features (small body size, terrestrial habits) that were predicted by previous studies to have been present in Late Cretaceous neornitheans and potentially contributed to their survival of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. (Said studies were primarily based on extrapolation from living birds, not relevant fossils—which, again, were nearly nonexistent other than Vegavis.)
I hope this helps with the assessment of whether our discovery is suitable as a Wikipedia news item and the formulation of an appropriate blurb. I'll refrain from commenting on whether or not it "should" be featured, given that I'm naturally not a neutral party in this discussion. However, regarding whether or not we "overblew" its significance, I personally think that we were suitably cautious in the writing of our paper. For relevant outside opinions, the publication is still too recent for any other peer-reviewed sources to have commented on it, but several news articles have included quotes from leading bird paleontologists who weren't involved in our study, including Jingmai O'Connor, Gerald Mayr [4], and Julia Clarke (who was the lead author in describing Vegavis) [5]. Let me know if there is anything else you'd like me to clarify. Albertonykus (talk) 02:01, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Arcane and not in the news. Zero tangible impact on anyone anywhere. – Sca (talk) 14:27, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

  • It absolutely was in the news across numerous top level news sources [6]. --Masem (t) 15:42, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Oh? I don't recall seeing it on major RS sites or hearing it on newscasts – was that selective perception on my part?
It's absolutely not in the news now. IMO it would be more appropriate for DYK, being a sort of oh-wow story – Sca (talk) 21:35, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have this to say about all science stories that don't involve the word "coronavirus"? Lythronaxargestes (talk | contribs) 17:16, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Would hazard a guess that it's more impactful than the usual diet of sports tournaments. —Nizolan (talk · c.) 17:19, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
Not to mention impossibly distant planets that "might" harbor "life." – Sca (talk) 21:35, 21 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Further comments[edit]

Please make any further comments here. Andrew🐉(talk) 12:19, 22 March 2020 (UTC)[reply]

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