The brains of today's birds facilitate a level of cognitive prowess and behavioral complexity rivaled only by mammals. But how the avian brain evolved over many millions of years from an ancestral dinosaurian form has long puzzled scientists.

Birds descended from the dinosaurs, but researchers have known relatively little about how the bird's brain took shape over millions of years. A new fossil sheds light on that mystery.

Palaeontologists have pieced together the brain structure of a bird that lived 80 million years ago named Navaornis hestiae, thanks to a remarkably well-preserved fossil