Archaeopteryx: The Holy Grail of Fossils

Jingmai O’Connor: As a paleontologist whose specialty is the evolution of birds, Archaeopteryx is like the holy grail. Never in my wildest dreams would I imagine I would be able to study one of the best specimens of this iconic species. Because Archaeopteryx is such a valuable fossil, there’s a lot of different analyses that have never been done. Because the specimen is just so spectacularly well preserved, we’ve learned a ton of just fundamental morphological information, meaning just basic information about what the skeleton looked like. And that’s something I’m really surprised by, because Archaeopteryx is one of the most heavily studied fossils of all time. There’s 12 specimens. And, yes, it’s very rare, but it’s actually the most common dinosaur from the Solnhofen Limestones. I’m really shocked that we’ve learned just tons of information about what the skull looked like, we’ve shown that the tail was longer than we previously thought. We also have more soft tissues with our specimen than any other Archaeopteryx, and these soft tissues are showing us how the wings looked. Also, it has this tract of feathers called tertials that have never been seen before and are bigger than any living bird. So we’re trying to unravel what that means in terms of the biology of Archaeopteryx. I’m hoping that we’re going to use this fossil to address questions that have been going on for 150 years, like how many species are represented by the specimen? Could it fly? How did it fly? For all the bird nerds out there, we’re also going to go into all these details about what Archaeopteryx ecology was to understand how its ecology may have set the stage for the entire subsequent Cretacious (Period) up to today. We’re going to do chemical spectral analyses to understand how the soft tissues and bones are preserved, and, yeah, I mean, the list goes on.