Vorona - encyclopedia article about Vorona.

For the commune in Botoşani County, Romania, see Vorona, Botoşani.

Vorona
Fossil range: Late Cretaceous

Extinct (fossil)

Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Genus:	*Vorona*
Species:	*V. berivotrensis*

Binomial name

Vorona berivotrensis
Forster et al., 1996

Vorona (VOO-roo-na, Malagasy for "bird", V. berivotrensis, "from Berivotra") is a monotypic genus of prehistoric birds. It was described from fossils found in a Maevarano Formation quarry near the village of Berivotra, Mahajanga Province, Madagascar. The age is Late Cretaceous, probably Campanian (70.6 - 83.5 mya). V. berivotrensis is known from scattered remains, possibly from a single individual (UA 8651 and FMNH PA715).

The phylogenic affiliation of Vorona is hard to determine due to the fragmentary nature of the remains, mainly because the fossil shows a mix of primitive avian features as well as some that seem very modern. Vorona might be a primitive ornithuromorph.

Vorona is sometimes confused with the dromaeosaur Rahonavis ostromi, a fossil of which was found in the same location. This confusion has led to the common misconception that Vorona had a deinonychosaur-like sickle claw on each foot.

References

Forster, Catherine A.; Chiappe, Luis M.; Krause, David W. & Sampson, Scott D. (1996): The first Cretaceous bird from Madagascar. Nature 382: 532-534. doi:10.1038/382532a0 (HTML abstract)

Footnotes

commune (comună in Romanian) is the lowest level of administrative subdivision in Romania. There are 2686 communes in Romania. The commune is the rural subdivision of a county (urban areas, such as towns and cities within a county, are given the status of city
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Motto

(each main institution has its own motto)
Anthem
Deşteaptă-te, române!

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Late Cretaceous (100mya - 65mya) refers to the second half of the Cretaceous Period, named after the famous white chalk cliffs of southern England, which date from this time. Rocks deposited during the Late Cretaceous Period are referred to as the Upper Cretaceous Series.
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conservation status of a species is an indicator of the likelihood of that species continuing to survive either in the present day or the future. Many factors are taken into account when assessing the conservation status of a species: not simply the number remaining, but the
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For other uses of the term, see Fossil (disambiguation)

FOSSIL is a standard for allowing serial communication for telecommunications programs under the DOS operating system.
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Scientific classification or biological classification is a method by which biologists group and categorize species of organisms. Scientific classification also can be called scientific taxonomy, but should be distinguished from folk taxonomy, which lacks scientific basis.
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Chordata
Bateson, 1885

Typical Classes

See below

Chordates (phylum Chordata) are a group of animals that includes the vertebrates, together with several closely related invertebrates.
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Aves
Linnaeus, 1758

Orders

About two dozen - see section below

Birds (class Aves) are bipedal, warm-blooded, egg-laying vertebrate animals.
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binomial nomenclature is the formal system of naming species. The system is also called binominal nomenclature (particularly in zoological circles), binary nomenclature (particularly in botanical circles), or the binomial classification system.
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Malagasy}}}
Language codes
ISO 639-1: mg
ISO 639-2: mlg
ISO 639-3: mlg

Malagasy (in French also: Malgache) is the national language of Madagascar.
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Monotypic is an adjective that refers to a taxonomic group with only one type:

in botany it means that a taxon has only one species; Ginkgo is a monotypic genus, while Ginkgoaceae is a monotypic family.

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genus (plural: genera) is part of the Latinized name for an organism. It is a name which reflects the classification of the organism by grouping it with other closely similar organisms.
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For other uses of the term, see Fossil (disambiguation)

FOSSIL is a standard for allowing serial communication for telecommunications programs under the DOS operating system.
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The Maevarano Formation is an Upper Cretaceous sedimentary rock formation found in the Mahajanga Province of northwestern Madagascar. It is most likely Maastrichtian in age, and records a seasonal, semiarid environment with rivers that had greatly varying discharges.
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Mahajanga is a province of Madagascar with an area of 150,023 km². It has a population of 1,733,917 (July, 2001). Its capital is Mahajanga.

Except for Fianarantsoa, Mahajanga Province borders all of the country's other provinces:

Antsiranana - north

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Motto
Tanindrazana, Fahafahana, Fandrosoana (Malagasy)
Patrie, liberté, progrès (French)
"Ancestral-land, Liberty, Progress"
Anthem

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The Campanian is a stage on the geologic time scale occurring from 83.5 ± 0.7 Ma to 70.6 ± 0.6 Ma (million years ago).

It is the middle stage of the Late Cretaceous Epoch.

It is named after the French village of Champagne in the departement Charente-Maritime.
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mya or "m.y.a." is an abbreviation for million years ago. This abbreviation is commonly used as a unit of time to denote length of time before the present or "B.P." (before AD 1950). Specifically, one mya is equal to 10⁶ years ago.
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University of Antananarivo (French: Université d’Antananarivo) is the primary public university of Madagascar, located in the capital Antananarivo.

The school traces its founding to December 16, 1955 and the formation of the Institute for Advanced Studies in
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Dromaeosauridae
Matthew & Brown, 1922

Genera

See text.

Dromaeosauridae is a family of bird-like theropod dinosaurs. They were mainly small, gracile carnivores that flourished in the Cretaceous Period.
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Rahonavis
Forster et al., 1998b

Species

R. ostromi (Forster et al., 1998a) (type)
Synonyms

Rahona Forster et al.
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Deinonychosauria
Colbert & Russell, 1969

Families

Dromaeosauridae
Troodontidae

The Deinonychosauria ("fearsome claw lizards") were a successful clade of theropods in the Late Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods.
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Nature is a prominent scientific journal, first published on 4 November 1869. Although most scientific journals are now highly specialized, Nature is one of the few journals, along with other weekly journals such as Science and
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digital object identifier (or DOI) is a permanent identifier given to a document, which is not related to its current location. A typical use of a DOI is to give a scientific paper or article a unique identifying number that can be used by anyone to locate details of the paper, and
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