Were there flightless birds in the Jurassic period?

Yes. A study published in Nature on October 14, 2026, describes Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis, a Late Jurassic bird from the Zhenghe Fauna of southeastern China that lived around the same time as Archaeopteryx and clearly could not fly.

It is one of the earliest-diverging avialans (the group that includes birds and their closest extinct relatives). Its forelimbs were markedly short, a condition common in non-bird theropod dinosaurs, which points to a ground-dwelling, flightless lifestyle. It also combined bird-like and troodontid-like skull features with a raptor-style hyperextensible second toe, suggesting that early birds were already exploring several different ways of life, not only powered flight.

Source: Xu et al., “Jurassic flightless bird reveals early ecological diversity of avialans,” Nature (October 14, 2026).

Image: Berlin specimen of Archaeopteryx lithographica, a Late Jurassic contemporary, by H. Raab, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

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