Fossil sheds light on hummingbird origins

Authored by nbcnews.com and submitted by swampyhiker

More than 30 million years ago, birds resembling hummingbirds were savoring nectar in the flowers of Europe, a continent where these birds long ago disappeared.

Fossil remains of the rare birds have been identified from a site in Germany, extending the age of hummingbirds well back in time.

Gerald Mayr reports Friday in the journal Science that the tiny bones represent the first hummingbirdlike fossils ever found outside the Americas.

“It is the first definite record of a modern-type hummingbird found in the Old World,” he said.

Previously, the oldest known hummingbirds were dated 1 million to 2 million years ago, based on remains found in cave deposits in Central America, Mayr said.

The German skeletons, less than 2 inches (5 centimeters) long, were found in a clay deposit in the German state of Baden-Württemberg and were identified by Mayr at the Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, a natural history museum in Frankfurt.

He named the new species Eurotrochilus inexpectatus, which means an “unexpected European version of Trochilus.” Trochilus is the name of a modern hummingbird genus.

Helen James, an ornithologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, said the group had been known previously, but researchers hadn’t had the skull and bill to study.

“It’s a beautiful specimen,” she said. “We know now, from this material, that the bird was hummingbirdlike in its bill form and certainly differs from the swift and other members of the order.”

Mayr said the find is a “striking example for the complexity of evolution and animal biogeography.”

“Hummingbirds hitherto were the textbook example for a New World radiation among birds. However, species that today are restricted to a certain region may have had a quite different or wider distribution in the past, with all its ecological implications. The find may further open a new view on the evolution of parts of the Old World flora,” he said.

The birds had long, nectar-sucking beaks, more than twice as long as their skull, and wings designed for feeding while hovering. Some flowers still exist there that are adapted to be pollinated by such birds. Those duties have since been taken over by others, such as long-tongued bees.

James said that previously the material had been interpreted as either coming from an early experiment in hummingbirdlike ecology or from the stem group of modern hummingbirds, since the bones did show modifications that could have enabled hovering flight.

“That question is still unresolved,” she said, but the skulls do tell something that had not been known before.

Murderer100 on September 29th, 2019 at 03:07 UTC »

There are a lot of animals which have prehistoric ranges that are very different from modern ranges:

Camelids and tapirs both evolved in North America during the Eocene (about 45 million years ago), spread into Eurasia and South America, and then became extinct on the continent they originated from. Elephants and their relatives were once spread out on every continent except Antarctica and Oceania until around the end of the last ice age. Both Komodo dragons and giant tortoises used to be considered examples of insular gigantism (the evolutionary phenomenon where organisms in isolated environments, usually islands, are much larger than close relatives on mainland ecosystems), but more recently, fossils indicate both were once widespread on mainland continents. Giant monitor lizards as large or larger than the Komodo were widespread across Oceania and Southern Asia into India (with the Komodo itself likely having evolved in Australia, dispersed north into Indonesia, and then became extinct everywhere except a few small islands by modern times), while giant tortoises were present on every continent except Antarctica, until around the end of the Pleistocene (about 12 000 years ago). The lion was once present throughout Europe, most of Asia, and into the Americas, as far south as Patagonia (depending on if cave lions and the American lion would be considered the same species as the modern species). There was a species of Asian ostrich that ranged as far east as Mongolia and China and only died out about 8000 years ago. There's even human-made artifacts created from its eggshells and painted artworks known of them. Fossils of platypus teeth (dating back about 60 million years ago) have been found in Argentina, indicating that (A) they once lived in Antarctica and South America, and (B) platypus have been around and physically unchanged for a very long time. The ancestors of marsupials seem to have evolved in Asia, spread into North America, where they evolved into true marsupials, and then spread south into South America, Antarctica, and Australia. And then for some unknown reason died out everywhere except South America and Australia (EDIT: although marsupials later returned to North America as the opossums). [Giant, ground-dwelling] sloths once roamed as far north as Yukon and Alaska until only about 11 000 years ago (the earliest humans to enter the Americas would have encountered, and hunted them), and there was also once a large, oceanic sloth. The tuatara is a type of lizard-like reptile that is only known from a few small New Zealand islands. But during the Mesozoic Era they had a global distribution, there were even marine forms. The Atlas bear was a subspecies of brown bear that lived in northern Africa until 1870 from human hunting. It was the only modern bear species that lived in Africa and coexisted with (also now extinct) populations of elephants and lions. All of these were gathered and hunted by the thousands by Romans, but only really died out with the development of firearms. From the Carboniferous up until around the end of the Cretaceous (a timespan of about 300 million years), freshwater sharks would have been commonplace. Horned frogs (the group in which the popular Pacman frog and the memetic Budgett's frog belong) are only known from South America today. However, a giant, armoured form known as Beelzebufo is known from the Late Cretaceous of Madagascar, suggesting these frogs were once widespread throughout the southern continents, which during the Cretaceous, would have been semi-conjoined as part of the supercontinent Gondwana. The last 3000 years are actually only time since they originally evolved (around 250 million years ago) that there is not a species of crocodile-line reptile that is primarily land-living around. The last one lived on the Oceanian islands of New Caledonia and Vanuatu, dying out shortly after the arrival of humans. There was a larger one (about the size of an American alligator) which probably encountered humans that lived in Australia, but it died out earlier. Another member of this same group also once lived in New Zealand (a long time before humans arrived this time) There were once numerous species of dwarf hippopotamuses (not to be confused with the unrelated pygmy hippopotamus) that inhabited the Mediterranean islands and Madagascar until (I'm sure you heard this one before...) shortly after humans arrived on these locations. It was believed that before humans arrived there, the only terrestrial mammals to reach New Zealand were bats, but in 2006, a fossil was described of a non-bat mammal that lived on the archipelago about 19-16 MYA. What is it and how it did it get there? We don't really know (although it appears it wasn't a marsupial or placental mammal), but it's very significant because it's believed most, or all of New Zealand was sunken a few million years prior to the time that it lived (and most modern fauna are descended from animals that arrived on the islands from air or sea after this). Up until the end of the ice ages, there were numerous species of horses present in the Americas (including forest-dwelling forms), but around 8000 years ago, the last ones died out (possibly due to climate change, human hunting, or both). Horses would return to the Americas during the 1400s, when domestic horses brought over by Spanish conquistadors gradually escaped and bred into feral colonies known as mustangs. Millions of years before humans had evolved, there were apes that lived in Europe.

vocalfreesia on September 29th, 2019 at 02:50 UTC »

There's also a super rare snail found in one cave in the US, and the only other place it was found was in Germany.

C_isBetter_Than_Java on September 29th, 2019 at 01:21 UTC »

They must’ve moved over to the America’s to find work