Confuciusornithidae

Confuciusornithidae is a family of primitive birds from the early Cretaceous Period of China. It consists of four genera. About half of all the confuciusornithid specimens, including reprersentatives of all species, that have preserved feathers possess a pair of distinctive ribbon-like tail feathers, and possessed both shafted and non-shafted (downy) feathers.

Taxonomy
The family Confuciusornithidae was first named by Hou et al. in 1995 to contain the type genus, Confuciusornis, and assigned to the order Confuciusornithiformes within class Aves. The group was given a phylogenetic definition by Chiappe, in 1999, who defined a node-based clade Confuciusornithidae to include only Changchengornis and Confuciusornis. Sereno expanded this definition to include all species closer to Confuciusornis sanctus than to the modern House Sparrow, Passer domesticus. Jinzhouornis was added to the Confuciusornithidae by Hou, Zhou, and Zhang in 2002,, and in 2008, Zhang, Zhou and Benton assigned the newly described genus Eoconfuciusornis to the family.

There are four genera and seven known species:
 * Changchengornis
 * Changchengornis hengdaoziensis
 * Confuciusornis
 * Confuciusornis sanctus
 * Confuciusornis dui
 * Confuciusornis feducciai
 * Confuciusornis jianchangensis
 * Eoconfuciusornis
 * Eoconfuciusornis zhengi
 * Jinzhouornis
 * Jingzhouornis yixianensis
 * Jingzhouornis zhangjiyingia

E. zhengi predated the other confuciusornithids by 11 million years.