Aurornis xui ( lat. , The possible Russian name is Auroornis sui ) is a species of avia (feathered dinosaurs close to archeopteryx ), the only one of the genus Aurornis (a possible Russian name is auroornis). A petrified specimen of this species was discovered by an amateur paleontologist in Liaoning Province in China and dates from the late Jurassic period - about 160 million years ago .
| † Aurornis xui |
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| Scientific classification |
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| No rank : | Bilateral symmetrical |
| Gender: | † Aurornis Godefroit et al. , 2013 |
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| International scientific name |
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Aurornis xui Godefroit et al. , 2013 |
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Phylogenetic analysis showed that this taxon is the basal group for the clade Avia, which systematists understand as birds in the broad sense ( sensu lato ), uniting the birds living in our time and their fossil predecessors [2] .
Aurornis xui lived about 10 million years earlier than Archeopteryx , which until the discovery of Aurornis was considered the oldest group of birds [3] .
The species name xui is given in honor of the Chinese paleontologist Xu Sina [2] . In the film " The Largest and Smallest ", auroornis was shown in the European area, where it was called the "early bird."
