Overview
- The Museo Paleontológico de Castilla-La Mancha publicly presented and put on display the holotype skull of Gorgonavis alcyone from the Las Hoyas site.
- The fossil represents a small enantiornithine bird with a long, thin, toothed snout preserved in a paper-thin adult skull dated to roughly 125 million years ago.
- Findings were published in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology following a two-year analysis using micro‑CT and 3D digitization by an international team including the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles and the universities of Cambridge, Málaga and the Autónoma de Madrid.
- The authors describe the specimen as the most significant enantiornithine cranial fossil outside China and report cranial affinities with Longipterygidae, suggesting a wider early distribution.
- Researchers note it as the first adult bird skull documented from the European Lower Cretaceous, and the museum is weighing a new space to showcase unique regional species.