Transitional fossil that share a more recent common ancestor with one another than they do with other groups. There are a few exceptional cases, such as some marine plankton microfossils, where the fossil record is complete enough to suggest with confidence that certain fossils represent a population that was actually ancestral to a later population of a different species. But, in general, transitional fossils are considered to have features that illustrate the transitional anatomical features of actual common ancestors of different taxa, rather than to "be" actual ancestors. "Archaeopteryx" is a genus of theropod dinosaur closely related to the birds. Since the
Archaeopteryx It was on display for the first time with six other original fossils of "Archaeopteryx" at the Munich Mineral Show in October 2009. The Daiting Specimen was subsequently named "Archaeopteryx albersdoerferi" by Kundrat et al. (2018). Another fragmentary fossil was found in 2000. It is in private possession and, since 2004, on loan to the Bürgermeister-Müller Museum in Solnhofen, so it is called the Bürgermeister-Müller Specimen; the institute itself officially refers to it as the "Exemplar of the families Ottman & Steil, Solnhofen". As the fragment represents the remains of a single wing of "Archaeopteryx", the popular name of this