46000-year-old well-preserved bird tricks researchers into believing it had died yesterday

A 46000 years old bird was so well preserved by the fossil hunters that they tricked scientists into believing that it had died a day ago. According to the reports, the bird is expected to be from the middle of the ice age and is believed to be an ancestor of the modern horned lark. It was discovered near Serbia's village of  Belaya Gora in a well-preserved condition. According to the researchers, it was a female bird and had a natural death. The age of the bird has been discovered through radiocarbon dating.

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Researchers studied the bird

Paleontologist Love Dalén along with his team has studied the bird and said that with the help of ornithologists the bird was correctly identified. The researchers said that no formal name has been given but as of now they are referred to as the 'Icebird'. Researchers revealed that the remains of the female lark was around 44,000 to 49,000 years old. They noted that it is the first bird carcass obtained from ice age permafrost deposits.

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Their findings were published on February 21 in journal Communications Biology. Nicholas Dussex, a researcher at Stockholm University said in a statement that lark is also an ancestor of two different lark subspecies. He added that one is found in Mongolia and the other one is found in Siberia. Scientists believe that the larks lived in during the last Ice Age and it provides further details to the ecosystem. The long term aim is to map the lark's genome and figure out comparing it to the modern subspecies for horned larks. Dussex further added that it helps them to understand how the diversity of subspecies progressed. 

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Meanwhile, researchers from Cornell University, with the help of a special type of radar, recently discovered footprints that were hidden since the last ice age and what lied underneath them. The fossilized footprints revealed a great deal of information in relation to how human beings and animals co-existed around 12,000 years ago.

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