Fossil Skull Of Oldest Modern Bird

An extraordinary fossil skull belonged to the oldest modern bird ever found. The duck-sized Asteriornis maastrichtensis lived 66.7 million years ago, just 700,000 years before the asteroid impact that killed off all non-avian dinosaurs. Palæontologists were staggered to discover the skull when they used a CT scan to look inside a rock found in Belgium in 2000 by an amateur fossil hunter.