https://www.livescience.com/ancient-bird-with-t-rex-skull

A 120 million-year-old bird fossil from China has some rather unusual dinosaur-like features in its otherwise standard avian skeleton, including a weirdly T. rex-like skull.

The fossil’s age suggets C. zhui likely appeared somewhere between the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, which lived about 150 million years ago during the Jurassic period, and the Ornithothoraces.

In a new study, published Jan. 2 in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, researchers analyzed the new fossil to see what traits it shared with both groups. After studying the fossils with a high-resolution computed tomography (CT) scan, which allowed them to virtually reassemble the bones in 3D, the team found that, despite a majority of the skeleton being very similar to Ornithothoraces, certain bones shared a surprisingly strong likeness to non-avian dinosaurs. The most striking similarity was in the skull, which has a shape that is nearly identical to that of dinosaurs such as T. rex,

This plasticity suggests that certain skeletal traits could have evolved independently from one another across the birds’ evolutionary tree, a phenomenon known as convergent evolution.

Well, not too T. rex like. I don’t see high-set eyes, heavy brow ridges, heavy skull or huge teeth here.