Birds of stone. Chinese avian fossils from the age of dinosaurs / Каменные птицы. Птичьи окаменелости Китая времен динозавров

It was very cold. The countryside was blanketed in snow, intermittently dotted by drab houses and small villages. We were traveling in a van to Chaoyang, an ancient city and birthplace of Chinese culture, some five hours northeast of Beijing, in the western portion of Liaoning Province. What brought us there was the promise of a treasure trove of birds of stone: a large collection of ancient fossils housed in a small local museum. Since the early 1990s, a wealth of extraordinary fossils of birds and other organisms had been unearthed from this region in the northeastern corner of China. Dating back more than 120 million years, these spectacular fossils were rewriting the evolutionary history of many groups of animals and plants in deep time <...>