Red herring or real ancestor?
There's a highly controversial fossil in the bird ancestry story. Protoavis is known from a handful of bony fragments collected from 200 million-year-old rocks in Texas. At this time the dinosaurs were just getting started and it's 50 million years before Archaeopteryx. Protoavis does have some bird-like features, but nothing that an early theropod dinosaur shouldn't have. Further, there seems to be a strong possibility that the fossils described as a single skeleton may actually belong to two or more individuals and possibly two or more species! The material is too fragmentary and ambiguous to work with so, until better material is found, most palaeontologists have set Protoavis aside.