A Really, Really Ex-Parrot

gyrogeerloose writes "According to a National Geographic News story, what may be the fossilized wing bone of an ancient parrot has been dubbed by its discoverers 'The Danish Blue' in honor of the famous Dead Parrot Sketch. If the 54 million year old bone did in fact belong to a parrot, it would be 'the oldest and most northerly remains of a parrot ever discovered.' There is some dispute among paleontologists about whether the bone was indeed that of a parrot. If it turns out to be so, however, it never had a chance to pine for the fjords — they were not carved out until an ice age millions of years after the bird lived."

Re: Danish Blue

[DogDaySunrise]

Er... Shouldn't that be the 'Norwegian Blue'? :o\

Re:I'm no expert

[Moraelin]

But... "The fossil-a large wing bone called the humerus"... could it not be just as likely that it was simply a mutated form of a known parrot that was around at that time (of which the time is hard to define) and possibly died because of said deformaties?

Exactly which part of "the oldest and most northerly remains of a parrot ever discovered" translates to you into "a known parrot that was around at that time"? No, seriously.

Also, is it not possible that this bird was caged in some Captains quarters of a ship, and this was deformed because of that?

Dude, let's put it like this:

- this thing is 54 _million_ years old

- humans, as in Homo Sapiens, are about 200,000 years old

- even Neanderthals, the only other species that ever reached sentience, isn't that horribly much older. The proto-neanderthals reached Europe some 350-500 thousand years ago, but the fully evolved Neanderthals are a mere 130,000 years old.

- the split between the ancestors of humans and chimpanzees happened some 6 million years ago. Which is to say that at that point, the most evolved form of life was something that was dumber and more primitive than the chimp. It's _not_ something that would build ships and sail the fjords.

So exactly what species would that captain be, 54 million years ago. Are we talking some time-travelling alien that took a different species of parrot from a later time, and then went back to 54 million years ago to dump its skeleton there and confuse a species that didn't even exist yet? Or what?

Heh.