Venomous bird fossil found

[Ihateyoumike]

Saw this in the paper today and found it pretty interesting.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-tc-nw-venomous-bird-1222-122dec23,0,1674077.story

thoughts?

[Whitney]

As surprising as this find is...I can't say I'm that surprised.  If the theory is correct that many prehistoric birds evolved into reptiles then it makes sense that some of them may have been venomous.

From the desption...if it wasn't in the Chicago Tribute I would lean further towards "let's wait for more evidence"....do you happen to know of more sources?  A picture would be great.

[Recusant]

Well, here is a story on the Sinornithosaurus from Ed Yong, which covers the debate about the critter in a little more depth, and has an illustration of it going after a primitive bird, as well as an image of a fossil.  There have been specimens of Sinornithosaurus around for a while; I remember reading about them almost 10 years ago, but I guess they just now made the discovery of grooved teeth and possible sites for venom glands.

[AlP]

The paper is here. The full text is only available to subscribers. This seems to be the official news release. It contains this video:

[youtube:a3ulwtvb]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kURPtK9DcE[/youtube:a3ulwtvb]

A|P notes that many journalists and bloggers are not good at using links to original sources.

Edit:
I originally wrote "hyperlinks" but fortunately remembered it is no longer the 1990s. Sorry about that.

Edit:
Press release from the Chinese Academy of Sciences (in English).

[Recusant]

A|P notes that many journalists and bloggers are not good at using links to original sources.

In Yong's defense, he did provide the document number from the PNAS as a reference at the end of his article.  True he didn't make it a link, but as you noted; unless you're subscribed to the PNAS, a link wouldn't be all that helpful.  However, in the comments section of his blog, there are some very interesting observations from Dr. John D. Scanlon which I will excerpt below:

 

The roots of teeth in archosaurs are hollow, and the cavity tapers upward inside the crown to some extent, varying through the cycle of tooth replacement as new mineral layers are deposited on the inner surface. Since the Sinornithosaurus fossils are strongly compressed on a bedding plane of fine-grained sediment, individual bones have undergone plastic deformation. This lateral compression of hollow teeth can be expected to produce lateral grooves; I'd predict them in any small archosaur with this kind of preservation, as an artifact. However, such grooves would not be expected to reach the tip of the tooth, and despite the statement in the paper they actually don't seem to do so in this fossil. Also not mentioned is that grooves are also present on the lingual surface (anterior dentary teeth in fig. 2), equally compatible with compression artifact but not supporting the idea that the lateral groove is specialized for venom conduction. The grooves look broad and shallow enough to be artifacts, rather than having distinct margins formed by enamel ridges.

Also, there's nothing in lizards or snakes analogous to the subfenestral fossa of Sinornithosaurus; it looks more like evidence of pneumatization, or possibly a salt gland (or maybe a specialized senseory structure like the pit organ of crotalid snakes), than a venom gland. The posterior orientation of the fossa canal (supposedly carrying the venom duct to the tooth bases) is exactly in the wrong direction for that function, so it would need to make a hairpin bend and then run forward for the full length of the fossa. We can't expect perfect design (cf. recurrent laryngeal nerve), but the venom duct hypothesis doesn't predict or explain this feature very well.

I take it from this that he's less than convinced by the available evidence.

(Edited to add link to Yong's blog for convenience and clarity. )

[LoneMateria]

Oh I don't like that fat bastard Larry Martin.  I watched a (either NOVA or a Discovery video) about dinosaurs evolving into birds and he was doing the most unscientific thing he could do.  He was looking for evidence to show that birds did not come from dinosaurs.  He had a preconceived notion that he wasn't willing to revise and came across a crushed fossil and was actively looking for some way to prove it (that birds didn't evolve from dinosaurs).  Of course he was dumbfounded when his competitor let him hold a uncrushed fossil and he saw he was wrong.  He stuck by his notion but you could tell he knew he was wrong.  He literally came out and said on the video that the species they were talking about (which was a gliding dinosaur) was the proof he had been searching for to prove that birds didn't come from dinosaurs.

I wish I could think of the name of that special. >.<

[Squid]

Here is the full paper for those interested:

http://www.mediafire.com/?4zjydzzlgfy