Compared to the giants that inhabited the skies during the Cretaceous period, they are small in size, but the bird that made this imprint about 120 million years ago did so in a very special place: in Gondwanaland, the supercontinent near Antarctica.
The footprints were found in the rocks of the Wonthaggi Formation, now located in South Australia. But when it was made it was very far to the south. It is rare to find such early birds near the Antarctic. A team from Emory University in the US made 27 discoveries in one fell swoop, they wrote in the journal. One plus.
This means that birds inhabited this area earlier than we previously knew, and also indicates a great diversity of species. The authors suggest that the animals may have stopped here on their migration route. However, the discovery suggests that we still don’t know everything about how birds spread across the Earth.
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