olelog

Hopefully you associate “Danish Blue” with delicious Danish cheese - a bit in the style of Roquefort and Stilton. This post is, however, about a parrot, bereft of life.

In the journal Palaeontology of May 2008 Waterhouse et al. describe two fossil parrots found in Denmark. They are so far the oldest fossil parrots, the most northerly found fossil parrots and one of them is the largest fossil parrot yet known. In fact all that remains of this early Danish parrot is a single upper wing bone (humerus). But, this small bone contains characteristic features that show that it is clearly from a member of the parrot family, about the size of a Yellow-crested Cockatoo. The bone, which is 6.5 cm long, was found on the island Mors in 2003, it is on display in a museum on Mors, the Molermuseum, and has now been determined by a team of palaeontologists. Image of bone in this Danish Article. With the present day climate there are no wild parrots (Psittacidae) in Denmark (although a small population of parakeets has established itself recently). Today parrots only live in the tropics and the southern hemisphere.

The new species, officially named 'Mopsitta tanta', has got the nick-name 'Danish Blue Parrot,' derived from a famous comedy sketch about a 'Norwegian Blue Parrot' in the 1970s BBC television programme 'Monty Python.' The Scandinavian connection makes links to Monty Python's notoriously demised bird irresistible, but the parallels go further. The famous sketch revolves around establishing that a bird purchased by John Cleese is a dead parrot, and these fossils are certainly dead.
The scientifique name Mopsitta tanta is derived from mo after moler (see below), psitta and tanta are latin for respectively 'parrot' and 'large' - the large ‘mo clay’ parrot. When Mopsitta was alive, which was only 10 million years after the dinosaurs were wiped out, most of Northern Europe was experiencing a warm period, with a large shallow tropical lagoon covering much of Germany, South East England and Denmark. (See map. Green = land, white = sea, All of the present Denmark was covered by sea). Denmark was closer to the equator at that time, and the poles were not covered with ice as now.

The fossils were found in a sort of diatomite, locally called moler, meaning whitish clay. Moler consists of cirka 45-65 % silica and silica shells of algae (diatoms - see image below of modern marine diatoms under microscope), 30-45 % clay and 10 % volcanic ashes. The sea bottom was depleted of oxygen, and the thick moler deposits are rich in fossils, including fossils of some 30 different bird species. Most of these would together with flying insects, also fossilised, have flown in from the exposed land areas in what is now Norway and Sweden.

The Danish moler deposit is up to 60 m thick. In other parts of the world there are no known deposits above 10 m thick.

Apart from the Molermuseum on Mors there is another interesting little geological museum on the island of fur, with fossils found in the local moler cliffs.

Reference:
Waterhouse et al.
Two New Parrots (Psittaciformes) From the Lower Eocene Fur Formation of Denmark
Palaeontology, Volume 51 Issue 3 Page 575-582, May 2008

English links
http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-4983.2008.00777.x
http://www.ucd.ie/news/2008/05MAY08/150508_parrot.html
http://www.sciencecentric.com/news/08051531.htm
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/topstories/2008/05/16/video-monty-python-s-norwegian-blue-parrot-did-exist-89520-20419112/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=566600&in_page_id=1770

Danish links
http://politiken.dk/videnskab/article509541.ece
http://www.dr.dk/Nyheder/Indland/2008/05/15/220046.htm?rss=true
http://ing.dk/artikel/88153?rss
http://stenfugle.blogs.ku.dk/
http://geologi.snm.ku.dk/nyheder_gm/nyhed160508/
http://nyhederne.tv2.dk/article.php/id-11591242.html?ss

Monday I went to Maastricht (in the Netherlands) to see some Chinese dinosaurs. For the time being (9 February 2008 - 27 April 2008) four giant, original dinosaur skeletons from the collections of the Beijing Natural History History Museum are on display in Western Europe for the very first time. I am by no means a dino fanatical, but they are intriguing beasts after all. The four main attractions were indeed Mamenchisaurus jingyanensis, Yangchuanosaurus shangyouensis, Lufengosaurus huenei, and Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus, but there were other interesting items as well, such as dinosaur eggs and a dinosaur nest plus a Psittacosaurus (of ONLY one metre length and a weight of around 20 kg).

Here I shall concentrate on the Tsintaosaurus. It seems appropriate to me because Maastricht gave name to the Maastrichtian, the last stage of the Cretaceous period, and therefore of the Mesozoic era (the era of the Dinosaurs). It spanned from 70.6 ± 0.6 to 65.5 ± 0.3 million years ago. The age of the Tsintaosaurus is about 80 million years, and thereby late Cretaceous.

Tsintaosaurus is a genus of hadrosaurid dinosaur from China. This specimen is 8 m long and weighs 3 tons. Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus is the type species and was first described by Young Chung Chien in 1958.

Tsintaosaurus is one of the more interesting looking hadrosaurs. The hadrosaurs are known as the duck-billed dinosaurs due to the similarity of their head to that of modern ducks. This is better seen on the nice reconstruction shown on this page. These plant-eating dinosaurs had toothless beaks, strong jaws and a massive battery of grinding teeth that would have let them efficiently eat tough foliage. It could have easily eaten pine needles. It's teeth were self-sharpening. Like other lambeosaurines, Tsintaosaurus had a species-specific crest or horn adorning its head. In this case, there had been controversy over whether or not Tsintaosaurus' unicorn-like horn was actually just a misplaced nasal bone. The discovery of other specimens with the bone in the same position seems to confirm that it was in fact a horn. No one is sure of the exact shape of the horn that developed around the fossilised bone. It may have been fat or thin. Some scientist have speculated that it had a sail, but there is no proof of that theory. No one knows what the horn was used for. It may have provided a visual signal in combat or courtship; it may have been used to make sounds, or it may even have enhanced its sense of smell. Because the horn was projecting forward, unlike a crest it is often being called, "the Unicorn Dinosaur". Tsintaosaurus spinorhinus had four-fingered hands. It lived in lakes.

Tsintaosaurus was named after the city of Tsingtao in Shandong Province, where the fossil was found. The species name spinorhinus refers to the spine-like crest on its head. Tsintaosaurus may be the same as Tanius (which was named earlier and therefore retains its name), which was a crestless Hadrosaurid from China. Tanius was named by Carl Wiman in 1929.

• http://www.nhmmaastricht.nl/engels/exposities/china_dino/index.html
• http://www.dinosaur-world.com/weird_dinosaurs/tsintaosaurus_spinorhinus.htm
• http://www.amonline.net.au/chinese_dinosaurs/factsheets/08.htm
• http://www.azhdarcho.com/Art/Paleoart/tsintaosaurus.htm
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsintaosaurus

I was in Berlin all last week. The timing was not optimal. The weather was bad and public transports were striking. Fortunately the natural history museum - Museum für Naturkunde - is in walking distance from the main station, indoors, and well worth a visit. The exhibitions include the famous Berlin specimen of the Archaeopteryx, which may well be the most famous fossil in the world. It is well worth mentioning that they exhibit the original, and not just a mould (or cast or replica or whatever they are called).

My photo here is of such a mould exhibited in a museum at Solnhofen, and thus not far from where the fossil was discovered in 1876 or 1877. Archaeopteryx lived in the late Jurassic Period around 155–150 million years ago. It is considered an important link between dinosaurs and birds, and has been called things like “a flying dinosaur” or “the first bird”. Similar in size and shape to a European Magpie, Archaeopteryx could grow to about 50 centimetres in length. Despite its small size, broad wings, and ability to fly, Archaeopteryx has more in common with small theropod dinosaurs than it does with modern birds.

This next image shows a model of Archaeopteryx lithographica on display at the Oxford University Museum.

I find it interesting to follow the evolution from feet to wings, and of course from hair to feather - two important steps towards flying. In fact the name Archaeopteryx is derived from the Ancient Greek archaios meaning 'ancient' and pteryx meaning 'feather' or 'wing'. Three fingers still had claws.

In the year 2000 palaeontologists found tiny feathers encased in a lump of amber in a quarry in the Poitou-Charentes region of France. The seven feathers are ca. a hundred million years old (Early Cretaceous, Late Albian) and have features of both feather-like fibers found with some two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods and of modern bird feathers. This is yet another link in or proof of the gradual evolution of feathers from the primitive filaments of some theropod dinosaurs to the modern feathers of Archaeopteryx and Cretaceous birds.

The work is reported in the Proceedings of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, of 7 March 2008 under the title
“The early evolution of feathers: fossil evidence from Cretaceous amber of France”.

And finally below an image of a reconstruction of the Archaeopteryx skeleton from the Berlin museum.


My earlier post on the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde is here and on the Archaeopteryx here.

• http://journals.royalsociety.org/content/102024/?k=Perrichot+feathers
• http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18285280
• http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/earth/2008/02/20/scidino120.xml
• http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080311-amber-feathers.html