A mouth built for efficiency may have helped the earliest bird fly

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The 150-million-year-old Archaeopteryx had mouth features similar to those of birds today Fleshy “teeth” on the roof of Archaeopteryx’s mouth, a sensory organ at the end of the beak and a highly mobile tongue (all illustrated) may have helped the ancient bird get the energy it needed to fly. About 150 million years ago, in a coastal lagoon in what is now southern Germany, the oldest known bird gobbled up food with a beak built for efficient eating. It’s finely tuned mouth anatomy, revealed in a newly analyzed fossil, may have helped it generate the energy required to fly, researchers report February 2 in The Innovation. Called Archaeopteryx, the animal had a toothed beak, hooked claws for grasping or climbing and feathered wings that it used for gliding and short bursts of flight. It is the earliest dinosaur that scientists also classify as a bird. “Archaeopteryx is the oldest dinosaur that we know of to fly using feathered airfoils,” says Jingmai O’Connor, a paleontologist at the Field Museum in Chicago. “Because flying takes more energy tha
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