150 million years ago, one of the first birds gave up flying

Birds were supposed to evolve toward ever-better flight. A crow-sized fossil from Fujian Province, China, tells a more interesting story. Named Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis and described in Nature, it lived 150 to 148 million years ago in the Zhenghe Fauna and sits just beyond Archaeopteryx in the bird family tree — yet it had already taken the path of flightlessness. Researchers from the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology and the Fujian Institute of Geological Sciences say it is among the earliest evidence that early birds diversified into many ways of life, not one straight line into the sky.