Yuornis (meaning "Henan bird", after the Chinese one-character abbreviation for Henan, ()) is an extinct genus of enantiornithean bird known from the Late Cretaceous of Henan, China. It contains one species, Yuornis junchangi, named after Lü Junchang.
Yuornis (meaning "Henan bird", after the Chinese one-character abbreviation for Henan, ()) is an extinct genus of enantiornithean bird known from the Late Cretaceous of Henan, China. It contains one species, Yuornis junchangi, named after Lü Junchang.
== Description == The holotype specimen is remarkably complete for a Late Cretaceous enantiornithean, possessing a three dimensionally-preserved skull and partial skeleton. Unlike most enantiornitheans, the skull of Yuornis was completely toothless and convergently similar to that of Neornithes (modern birds). The lacrimal and postorbital bones are completely absent and the squamosal is strongly reduced; these losses leave the antorbital fenestra and supratemporal fenestra confluent with the orbit (eye socket), also like some modern birds. Unlike modern birds, the premaxilla makes up a smaller portion of the lower edge of the snout, while the quadratojugal is unusually large and complex.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).