In a paper published in Nature Communications on January 22, 2013, a team of paleontologists（古生物学者） including Dr. Luis Chiappe, Director of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County's (NHM) Dinosaur¹ Institute, has discovered a way to determine the sex of an avian dinosaur species. Confuciusornis sanctus, a 125-million-year-old Mesozoic bird, had remarkable² differences in plumage -- some had long, almost body length ornamental³ tail feathers, others had none -- features that have been interpreted as the earliest example of avian courtship. However, the idea that male Confuciusornis birds had ornamental plumage, and females did not, has not been proven until now. Chiappe and the team studied hundreds of Confuciusornis fossils unearthed⁴ from rocks deposited at the bottom of ancient lakes in what is today northeastern China and found undisputed evidence of the gender⁵ difference: medullar（骨髓的） bone.

 

Chiappe conducted the study with Anusuya Chinsamy of the Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape⁶ Town, South Africa; Jesús Marugán-Lobón of Madrid's Universidad Autonóma, Cantoblanco; Gao Chunling and Zhang Fengjiao of the Dalian Natural History Museum in China.

 

"Our discovery provides the first case of sex identification in an ancient bird, an animal closely related to dinosaurs⁷, such as the famous Velociraptor," said Chiappe. "When people visit dinosaur exhibits, they often want to know if the skeletons are male or female. We have nicknames like Thomas and Sue, but of all the thousands of skeletons of dinosaurs or early birds found around the world, only the sex of a few has been determined⁸."

 

According to Chinsamy, the bone histologist（组织学家） on the team, "Just like modern hens, female Confuciusornis birds that lived 125 million years ago deposited this special bone inside their long bones, and then used it to make the calcium-rich eggshells." Finding such tissue -- present during a short period of time in reproductively active females -- in a specimen⁹ that lacked long feathers proved that those birds without ornamental plumage are females.

 

"This now permits us to assess gender differences in growth and development of this Mesozoic bird," she said.

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