THE world’s best preserved archaeopteryx fossil has surfaced after many years in a private collection. The exquisite specimen reveals that the bird was even more dinosaur-like than we originally thought.
“It’s a phenomenally preserved specimen,” says Peter Makovicky of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. The new specimen’s foot has the hyper-extendible second toe of “raptor” dinosaurs – the killer-talon of Jurassic Park‘s infamous velociraptor.
But the specimen also reveals that the first toe was not fully reversed as in modern birds. A key skull bone also looks more dinosaurian than bird-like. In other specimens these details are…
