The Cretaceous bird Jeholornis pooping out seeds from fruit, helping fruit-bearing plants take over the world. Credit: Zhixin Han and Yifan Wang.
Phys.org has a story about birds and fruit. Jingmai O'Connor of the Field Museum is co-writer of a paper (in the journal eLife) about the early bird Jeholornis, which is believed to lived on a diet of fruit about 120 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. Jeholornis fossils have been found in China.
"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."
The crown group of birds is the group that's alive today, Neornithes, and their direct ancestors. But other birds began evolving tens of millions of years earlier; the second-most primitive known bird was a long-tailed raven-sized creature called Jeholornis. The time between the first Jeholornis and the first T. rex is about the same as the amount of time separating the last T. rex and modern humans.
