While these are all common attributes of bird tracks, there’s just one problem—true birds don’t arrive in the fossil record until some 60 million years later, in the Late Jurassic.

While these are all common attributes of bird tracks, there’s just one problem—true birds don’t arrive in the fossil record until some 60 million years later, in the Late Jurassic.

One of the ancient bird footprints documented by the researchers in Victoria state, southeastern Australia. The footprints are thought to have been made more than 120 million years ago.

Fossilized Trisauropodiscus tracks from more than 210 million years ago (marked with 4 cm scale) compared to modern bird tracks from March 2018 (marked with 3 cm scale) Abrahams et al. under CC-BY 4.0 ...

The oldest fossil bird-like footprints from the upper Triassic of southern Africa. PLOS ONE , 2023; 18 (11): e0293021 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293021 Cite This Page : ...