The Cretaceous bird Jeholornis pooping out seeds from fruit, helping fruit-bearing plants take over the world. Illustration by Zhixin Han and Yifan Wang.
The Field Museum has a press release about some recently published research about birds. Associate Curator of Fossil Reptiles Jingmai O'Connor co-authored a paper called "Earliest evidence for fruit consumption and potential seed dispersal by birds", which has been published in the journal eLife. The paper looks at an exquisitely preserved new skull of Jeholornis. Previously, seeds had been found in fossilized gut contents from a fossil Jeholornis. But, the morphology of the new head fossil shows that it most likely ate fruit and not exclusively seeds.
Hundreds of animals eat fruit, from toucans to fruit bats to maned wolves to humans. But most fruit-bearing plants evolved relatively recently in Earth’s history, showing up for the first time in the Cretaceous: the final period of the dinosaurs. In a new paper in eLife, scientists tracked down the first fossil evidence of fruit consumption by comparing the skull shapes and stomach contents of fossil birds. The verdict: the earliest-known fruit-eater was an early bird called Jeholornis that lived 120 million years ago, and it may have helped contribute to the spread of the plants that dominate the world today.
“This is the oldest evidence of fruit-eating in any animal,” says Jingmai O’Connor, associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum in Chicago and co-author of the new eLife paper. “Fruits are an incredible resource that everybody’s familiar with, and the plants that produce them are everywhere, but it wasn’t always that way. This discovery about how and when birds started exploiting this resource could help explain why these kinds of plants are so dominant in our landscape today.”
“Birds are important consumers of fruit today, and play important roles in seed dispersal, but so far there has not been direct evidence of fruit consumption by early birds, outside the bird crown group,” says Han Hu, a researcher at Oxford University and the study’s first author. “This obstructs our understanding of the origins of this important plant-animal interaction.”
