The 11th skeleton of Archaeopteryx. Photo by Helmut Tischlinger.
For Archaeopteryx, 2011 has been a year of ups and downs. Paleontologists celebrated the 150th anniversary of when the iconic feathered dinosaur was named. But shortly afterwards, a controversial paper in Nature in July proposed that the creature—widely hailed as the first bird—was further removed from avian ancestry than previously thought. Now Archaeopteryx is back on the upswing. According to a press release circulated by the New Munich Trade Fair Centre in Germany, paleontologists now have an 11th specimen of the famous fossil creature to study.
Until this week, ten Archaeopteryx skeletons were known to paleontologists, not including the fossil feather the German paleontologist Hermann von Meyer used to give the animal its name. Peter Wellnhofer, the world’s foremost expert on the “urvogel,” detailed the backstory of each fossil in his comprehensive book Archaeopteryx: The Icon of Evolution.
The London specimen and the Berlin specimen are the best
known—particularly the latter, arguably one of the most visually
stunning fossils ever found—but there’s also the busted-up Maxberg
specimen, another that was initially confused for a pterosaur (the
Haarlem specimen) and a slab known as the Solnhofen specimen that was
originally thought to contain the skeleton of the small coelurosaurian
dinosaur Compsognathus.