Sinornis santensis

Santan Chinese Bird

Sinornis santensis

(Sereno, Rao, 1992)

The Early Cretaceous habitat called Liaoning , in China, supports a tremendous number of feathered dinosaurs. Since their origin in the Early Jurassic Asia, these creatures have diversified enormously. In this place, virtually all small dinosaurs posses feathers.

Among the myriad bird-dinosaurs and dinosaur-birds, there are creatures that anyone would recognize as modern birds, that is, until one approached them and studied them carefully. Sinornis santensis is one such "bird". It is a sparrow-sized animal, with sharp claws on its feet, ideal for grasping tree bark. With the aid of these talons, S. santensis can skitter up and down trees, probing for insects in crevasses. This bird also possesses an unusually large crop, and is capable of digesting the tough tissues of the very leaves of the trees around which it lives (Fedducia 150).

S. santensis is an excellent flier, capable of moving with great agility through the air. It is a poor walker, however, the revered toes on its feet making running difficult and can only skitter across the ground, relying on flight to travel any distance. Since it does not posses a alulas on its wings, S. santensis cannot pull off the slow-speed maneuvering necessary for landing on branches and grasping them with its feet. Instead, the little bird brings all four limbs into play, grasping a branch first with its foot claws, then with its hands

Other sites containing pertinent information:

Articles about Sinornis by Jeff Poling are:

The problems with The Origin and Evolution of Birds .

Problems with The Origin and Evolution of Birds, The

T. Mike Keesey's Sinornis page

Øyvind M. Padron's Sinornis (skeletal reconstruction) !

The Rise of Birds by Sankar Chatterjee. Published in 1997 by Johns Hopkins University Press.

The Origin and Evolution of Birds (second edition), by Alan Feduccia, published in 1999 by Yale University Press