Navaorni’s hestia is a new species of fossil bird, which lived 80 million years ago in what is now Brazil. The animal, the size of a small pigeon, presented characteristics intermediate between Archeopteryxone of the oldest birds – dating back 150 million years ago – and modern birds. Described in Nature of November 14 by Guillermo Navalon (University of Cambridge) and his colleagues, it owes its name to researcher William Nava, who discovered it in 2016 in a quarry in southeastern Brazil. But also to the Greek goddess Hestia, considered both the youngest and the oldest of the Olympian deities. “This reflects the duality between his belonging to an archaic lineage [disparue] and modern cranial geometry »write the researchers. The exceptional state of preservation of the fossil made it possible to reveal the structure of its brain by scanning. The portion devoted to flight control was smaller than in modern birds.
