I’m sure many of us remember the famous Monty Python ‘Dead Parrot’ sketch, featuring the mythical ‘Norwegian Blue’ bird. For those who don’t (and for those of us who’d like to revisit it):
A news report now suggests that the sketch might have been prophetic.
Dr David Waterhouse, a fossil expert and Python fan, has found that parrots not only lived in Scandinavia 55 million years ago, but probably evolved there before spreading into the southern hemisphere.
His discovery was based on a preserved wing bone of a previously unknown species, given the scientific name Mopsitta Tanta – and now nicknamed the Norwegian Blue.
Dr Waterhouse, 29, said of Mopsitta Tanta: “Obviously, we were dealing with a bird that is bereft of life, but the tricky bit was establishing it was a parrot.”
He was studying for a PhD at the University of Dublin in 2005 when he visited a museum in Jutland and spotted a fossilised 2in-long humerus – appropriately enough, the funny bone – among bird remains which had been found near an open-cast mine.
Research has now confirmed the bone was part of an upper wing from a bird in the parrot family. Although the mine was in Denmark, the birds would also have lived in what is now Norway.
“It isn’t as unbelievable as you might think that a parrot was found so far north.
“When Mopsitta was alive, most of northern Europe was experiencing a warm period, with a large shallow tropical lagoon covering much of Germany, South-East England and Denmark.
“This was only ten million years after the dinosaurs were wiped out and some strange things were happening with animal life all over the planet.
“After the dinosaurs, lots of niches needed filling. No southern hemisphere fossil parrot has been found older than about 15million years, so this new evidence suggests parrots evolved here in the northern hemisphere before diversifying further south in the tropics later on.”
However, the Pythons were wrong about one thing…the Blue could hardly have pined for the fjords.
“This parrot shuffled off its mortal coil around 55million years ago, but the fjords in Norway were formed during the last Ice Age and are less than a million years old,” said Dr Waterhouse.
Told yesterday about the Blue’s discovery, Michael Palin chuckled, saying: “It just shows that nothing is original.”
Peter
Beautiful plumage.
Fascinating!
I’d like to know if the fossilized bird “prefers kippin’ on ‘is back.”