IRISH-BASED researchers have discovered the oldest known parrot fossil – a wing bone from a bird that lived 55 million years ago.
Moreover, it lived far from the tropics, on the fringes of what is now the North Sea in far northwest Denmark.
Dr David Waterhouse, who is lead author in a research paper on the ancient parrot published this morning in the journal Palaeontology, explained that the climate was more “parrot-like” then in the area in question.
“The climate at the time was a bit warmer – there was a tropical lagoon there,” Dr Waterhouse said yesterday.
The fossil find in what is now the Isle of Mors, was also a bit farther south due to movements of the Earth’s crust, but the bone does represent the oldest, largest and most northerly discovery of parrot remains.
The claim for the parrot record is made on a single bird humerus, the upper wing bone, dug out of a quarry on Mors, Dr Waterhouse explained.
The otherwise unremarkable five- or six-centimetre long bone lay in a drawer in the Moler Museum on Mors for some years before someone there got curious. “The museum director found it, but didn’t know what it was,” Dr Waterhouse said.
Dr Waterhouse, who is now assistant curator of natural history at Norfolk Museums Service in Britain, was a PhD candidate at University College Dublin when a request arrived to identify the mysterious bone. He had received a scholarship from UCD and also funding from the Irish Research Council for Science, Engineering and Technology.
He joined with UCD colleague Dr Gareth Dyke, Bent Lindow at the University of Copenhagen and Nikita Zelenkov of the Palaeontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences to discover what class of bird once owned the humerus.
All were taken aback when they discovered the bone was distinctively parrot-like, so much so that it was declared a new parrot species, Mopsitta tanta aka the Danish Blue Parrot.
The bone size suggests that the Danish Blue was about the size of a modern crow or a yellow-crested cockatoo, Dr Waterhouse said.
The quarry at Mors, which digs out soft stone for use as kitty litter, actually yielded up two avian fossils. The second is most likely an even earlier but now extinct parrot predecessor from the Pseudasturidae family, but the identification is less definitive than for the Blue.
The Blue was in circulation just 10 million years after the extinction of the dinosaurs. The find strengthens arguments that parrots may have evolved in the north, given the oldest southern hemisphere parrot fossils are a mere 15 million years old.