Chinese Fossils Show All Birds Descended From Waterfowl - Reuters

WASHINGTON - A set of 110-million-year-old fossils from China is the earliest example of a modern-looking bird and strongly suggests ancestors of all living birds were waterfowl, researchers said on Thursday.

The pigeon-sized bird probably resembled a tern or a loon, the researchers said. Called Gansus yumenensis, it would have been an accomplished flyer and diver and could well be one of the ancestors of modern birds, the researchers report in Friday's issue of the journal Science. "Every bird living today, from ostriches ... to bald eagles, probably evolved from a Gansus-like ancestor," Matthew Lamanna of Carnegie Natural History Museum in Pittsburgh told a news conference.

Peter Dodson, professor of anatomy the University of Pennsylvania, who oversaw the research, said, "Gansus is very close to a modern bird and helps fill in the big gap between clearly non-modern birds and the explosion of early birds that marked the Cretaceous period, the final era of the Dinosaur Age."

The five skeletons come from an exceptionally rich fossil bed in China's Gansu Province, in a poor farming area near Changma, 1,200 miles (2,000 km) west of Beijing.

EDIT

http://www.planetark.com/dailynewsstory.cfm/newsid/36855/story.htm

at least in the New World and Australia, as Noah couldn't get them on the ark.