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| Life reconstruction of enantiornithine birds feeding. Longipteryx (left), Bohaiornis (centre), and Pengornis (right) are pictured in the Early Cretaceous forests of northeastern China, roughly 120 million years ago. in Miller, Bright, Wang, Zheng & Pittman. 2024. |
Abstract
Enantiornithines were the dominant birds of the Mesozoic, but understanding of their diet is still tenuous. We introduce new data on the enantiornithine family Bohaiornithidae, famous for their large size and powerfully built teeth and claws. In tandem with previously published data, we comment on the breadth of enantiornithine ecology and potential patterns in which it evolved. Body mass, jaw mechanical advantage, finite element analysis of the jaw, and traditional morphometrics of the claws and skull are compared between bohaiornithids and living birds. We find bohaiornithids to be more ecologically diverse than any other enantiornithine family: Bohaiornis and Parabohaiornis are similar to living plant-eating birds; Longusunguis resembles raptorial carnivores; Zhouornis is similar to both fruit-eating birds and generalist feeders; and Shenqiornis and Sulcavis plausibly ate fish, plants, or a mix of both. We predict the ancestral enantiornithine bird to have been a generalist which ate a wide variety of foods. However, more quantitative data from across the enantiornithine tree is needed to refine this prediction. By the Early Cretaceous, enantiornithine birds had diversified into a variety of ecological niches like crown birds after the K-Pg extinction, adding to the evidence that traits unique to crown birds cannot completely explain their ecological success.
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| Life reconstruction of enantiornithine birds feeding. Longipteryx (left), Bohaiornis (centre), and Pengornis (right) are pictured in the Early Cretaceous forests of northeastern China, roughly 120 million years ago. Bohaiornis is depicted feeding on cypress (Cupressaceae, Ding et al., 2016) leaves after the findings in this work. Longipteryx is depicted feeding on the mayfly Epicharmeropsis hexavenulosus (Huang et al., 2007) after (Miller et al., 2022). Pengornis is depicted feeding on the fish Lycoptera davidi (Chang and Miao, 2004) after Miller et al., 2023. |
Case Vincent Miller, Jen A. Bright, Xiaoli Wang, Xiaoting Zheng and Michael Pittman. 2024. Synthetic Analysis of Trophic Diversity and Evolution in Enantiornithes with New insights from Bohaiornithidae. eLife. DOI: 10.7554/eLife.89871.3
