Utahn part of 'missing link' find

Three scientists who became friends when they were graduate students — including Jerald D. Harris, now at Dixie State College in St. George — have made the find of a lifetime. They have discovered the world's earliest fossils, which look much like modern birds.

"A Nearly Modern Amphibious Bird from the Early Cretaceous of Northwestern China," a study published in the journal Science, details a most unusual bird dating to between 115 million and 110 million years ago.

What's unusual is that the bird looks like a present-day shorebird. The discovery is being called the "missing link in bird evolution," said Chris Taylor, spokesman for Dixie State College.

With the recent dinosaur footprint and other discoveries, St. George has become a hotbed for paleontological interest, Taylor said.

"This kind of adds fuel to that fire, to have a Dixie State professor involved with a discovery like this."

Gansus yumenensis, the Chinese species, would look a lot like a loon, said Harris, director of paleontology and an associate professor at the St. George college.

He is one of three lead authors of the report. The others are Hai-lu You of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing and Matthew C. Lamanna of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.

The three were graduate students together at the University of Pennsylvania. "That's how we met," Harris said in a telephone interview.

You was the first to earn his doctorate, and then he returned to his homeland, China. He became a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences and carried out field work in a dinosaur quarry.

He realized that about 125 miles to the south, the fossilized foot bone of an early bird had been found in the 1980s. It was not enough to tell much about the whole animal, and You decided to go to the area and do a quick exploratory dig.

"They started finding fossil birds almost immediately," Harris said.

The dig near Changma, China, had such rich potential for important discoveries that You called his friends Harris and Lamanna and asked if they would like to get involved. "We both jumped at the chance," Harris said.

In China, they went to the quarries and also to the lab in Beijing. "We did go out there, did a little bit of digging, but most of what we did was analyzing the fossils that Hai-lu's crew had dug up already," Harris said.