Skip to content
EntityQ108770920· pop 5· linked from 113 articles

Yuornis (meaning "Henan bird", after the Chinese one-character abbreviation for Henan, ()) is an extinct genus of enantiornithean bird known from the Late Cretaceous of Henan, China. It contains one species, Yuornis junchangi, named after Lü Junchang.

Wikidata facts

Parent taxon
Enantiornithes
Image
Yuornis skull diagram.png
Show 4 more facts
taxon name
Yuornis
taxon rank
genus
time period
Late Cretaceous
location of discovery
Henan
Sources (1)

via Wikidata · CC0

~2 min read

Encyclopedic overview

3 sections
Contents
  • Description
  • Classification
  • References

Yuornis (meaning "Henan bird", after the Chinese one-character abbreviation for Henan, ()) is an extinct genus of enantiornithean bird known from the Late Cretaceous of Henan, China. It contains one species, Yuornis junchangi, named after Lü Junchang.

== Description == The holotype specimen is remarkably complete for a Late Cretaceous enantiornithean, possessing a three dimensionally-preserved skull and partial skeleton. Unlike most enantiornitheans, the skull of Yuornis was completely toothless and convergently similar to that of Neornithes (modern birds). The lacrimal and postorbital bones are completely absent and the squamosal is strongly reduced; these losses leave the antorbital fenestra and supratemporal fenestra confluent with the orbit (eye socket), also like some modern birds. Unlike modern birds, the premaxilla makes up a smaller portion of the lower edge of the snout, while the quadratojugal is unusually large and complex.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Yuornis” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Available in 5 languages

via Wikidata sitelinks · CC0