Baptornis
Extinct genus of flightless, aquatic birds / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Dear Wikiwand AI, let's keep it short by simply answering these key questions:
Can you list the top facts and stats about Baptornis?
Summarize this article for a 10 year old
Baptornis ("diving bird") is a genus of flightless, aquatic birds from the Late Cretaceous, some 87-80 million years ago (roughly mid-Coniacian to mid-Campanian faunal stages). The fossils of Baptornis advenus, the type species, were discovered in Kansas, which at its time was mostly covered by the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow shelf sea. It is now known to have also occurred in today's Sweden, where the Turgai Strait joined the ancient North Sea; possibly, it occurred in the entire Holarctic.
Baptornis | |
---|---|
Illustration of a tarsometatarsus, 1880 | |
Scientific classification | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Clade: | Dinosauria |
Clade: | Saurischia |
Clade: | Theropoda |
Clade: | Avialae |
Clade: | †Hesperornithes |
Family: | †Baptornithidae AOU, 1910 |
Genus: | †Baptornis Marsh, 1877 |
Species: | †B. advenus |
Binomial name | |
†Baptornis advenus Marsh, 1877[1] | |
Synonyms | |
Parascaniornis Lambrecht, 1933 |
Othniel Charles Marsh discovered the first fossils of this bird in the 1870s. This was, alongside the Archaeopteryx, one of the first Mesozoic birds to become known to science.