Introduction

Min Wang was born in Shaanxi Province in May 1986. He received his Bachelor’s degree form Nanjing University in 2009, and Ph.D from the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2014. He worked as an Assistant Research Fellow at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IVPP) from 2014 to 2015 and was promoted to Associate Profess in 2016. In 2018, he was promoted to Professor and served as Deputy Director of Department of Paleoichthyology and Paleoherpetology since 2021.

His main research focus is about various aspects of the evolution of birds during the Mesozoic Era, a critical phase when birds split from the dinosaur branch and evolved the bauplan of modern birds. In doing so, He has been collecting comparative anatomical, histological and ontogenetic data to infer the taxonomy, phylogeny, ontogeny and ecology of Mesozoic birds. He has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers, including 38 papers as the first or the corresponding author, some of which were published in high-impact journals such as Nature, PNAS, Nature Communications, Nature Ecology & Evolution, and Current Biology. For his creative contribution, he was selected as one of the eight executive members of the Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution in 2016. In addition, he served as a member of the Editorial Group of the National Science Review since 2021, and served as a member of the editorial board of Vertebrata Palasiatica.

The origin and early evolution of birds

Birds are the most species and ecological diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates on Earth, with over 160 million years history. The evolutionary success of birds can be largely attributed to their characteristic morphological and biological features. How these features evolved and changed can only be investigated from fossil records using multiple methods. Mesozoic is a critical interval that records how birds were descended from theropod dinosaurs and then became evolutionarily successful. Min Wang intends to decipher the deep evolutionary history of birds and has made innovative discoveries, with combining efforts from paleontology and other disciplines such as developmental and functional biology. His major findings include building and revising the phylogenetic tree of Mesozoic birds, dating the origin of major Mesozoic avian lineages, and quantifying the evolutionary rate and the patterns and modes of disparity in early avian history. He and his colleagues have reported a Jurassic scansoriopterygid theropod dinosaur which demonstrated the loss of membranous wings in dinosaurs, and this study was published in Nature as the cover article. He led a research team that found the first dinosaur in Fujian Province with skeletal remains and named a new terrestrial fauna Zhenghe Fauna. This dinosaur represents one of the stratigraphically youngest and geographically southernmost Jurassic avialans, which to some degree filled the spatio-temporal gap in early evolutionary history of birds.