Australornis (Latin: "southern bird") is a genus of extinct seabird discovered in New Zealand. It lived in the Paleocene epoch, 60.5 to 61.6 million years ago (Ma). The type species name originates from australis, Latin for "southern", and ornis, the Greek word for "bird", and lovei commemorates Leigh Love, an amateur paleontologist who discovered it.
Australornis (Latin: "southern bird") is a genus of extinct seabird discovered in New Zealand. It lived in the Paleocene epoch, 60.5 to 61.6 million years ago (Ma). The type species name originates from australis, Latin for "southern", and ornis, the Greek word for "bird", and lovei commemorates Leigh Love, an amateur paleontologist who discovered it.
Australornis is one of the oldest flying seabirds. It is also the first non-sphenisciform (penguins and allies) bird fossil discovered from New Zealand for that age. The fossil originates from an era just after the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 66 million years ago. The features of the bird indicate that it does not belong to any of the extant bird families, but to a precursor group or clade which is extinct; hence it is a find of global significance with regard to the evolution of birds. Though the fossil evidence is incomplete to substantiate phylogeny, Australornis contributes to the emerging view that the diversification of Neoaves had already begun in the earliest Paleogene.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).