thumb|Speculative life restoration of Janavis on a beach Janavis (from the Roman god Janus and the Latin avis for bird) is an extinct toothed bird belonging to the Ichthyornithes from the Late Cretaceous of Belgium. The genus has one named species, Janavis finalidens (from Latin finalis, meaning ending or final, and dens, for tooth) that was discovered in the 1990s, reported in 2002, and described in 2022. Recovered almost simultaneously from the same area and age as Asteriornis maastrichtensis, then the oldest known modern bird, it provides information on the evolution and divergence of basal
thumb|Speculative life restoration of Janavis on a beach Janavis (from the Roman god Janus and the Latin avis for bird) is an extinct toothed bird belonging to the Ichthyornithes from the Late Cretaceous of Belgium. The genus has one named species, Janavis finalidens (from Latin finalis, meaning ending or final, and dens, for tooth) that was discovered in the 1990s, reported in 2002, and described in 2022. Recovered almost simultaneously from the same area and age as Asteriornis maastrichtensis, then the oldest known modern bird, it provides information on the evolution and divergence of basal and modern birds, especially on the evolutionary modifications of bird skulls.
== Fossil == The fossil of Janavis, holotype, NHMM RD 271, is embedded in hard rock from the Valkenburg Member of the Maastricht Formation, dating from the Maastrichtian, that made it impossible to perform a detailed analysis without breaking it up. Only parts of the skull (a left pterygoid bone at first mistaken for a part of the forelimb) are exposed on the main block; while a fragmentary tooth, a toe phalanx and three vertebrae of the backbone are associated with it. Examination using computed tomography in 2021 revealed additional structures inside the rock including neck bones (six cervical vertebrae), an additional four dorsal vertebrae, the first phalanx of the second digit of the forelimb, the left scapula, a humerus and a bit of the upper right femur.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).