Seminar

Longipterygid Birds: Reconstructing Diet via Quantitative Analysis

Date

January 18,2022
Time

4:00PM - 4:30PM
Veune

JL104
Speaker

Mr. Case Vincent Miller (Supervisor: Dr. Michael Pittman) Department of Earth Sciences, HKU

Longipterygidae is one of the best known group of Cretaceous birds, famous for their long snout with teeth restricted only at the tip. This strange morphology has lead scientists to hypothesise that they ate fish probed for invertebrates, but these hypotheses have gone untested. I apply four quantitative analyses to investigate the diet of this group: body mass, claw traditional morphometrics, skull mechanical advantage, and finite element analysis of the skull. Results support all longipterygids being invertivorous, with some variation in degrees of arboreality.

Additional Information: Mr. Case Miller, Case.Miller@connect.hku.hk