Record breaking 55m-year-old parrot

An Irish-funded researcher claims to have set a new record for the oldest known parrot fossil, and at the same time helped to rewrite natural history.

The 55-million-year-old bone was dug from a Danish quarry and proves the colourful birds lived on the edges of the North Sea - much further from the tropics than previously thought. It is officially known as Mopsitta tanta, but researcher Dr David Waterhouse has nicknamed it the Danish Blue after the iconic Monty Python comedy sketch featuring a dead Norwegian parrot.

The remarkable find, published in the journal Palaeontology, was uncovered after the former University College Dublin student asked to inspect a 5-6cm bone which had lain unidentified in Danish a museum for several years.

"Obviously, we are dealing with a bird that is 'bereft of life', but the tricky bit is establishing that it was a parrot," he said.

The fossil was found on a quarry on the Isle of Mors, Denmark, around eight years ago and is believed to be the oldest, largest and most northerly discovery of parrot remains.

Dr Waterhouse said the bone is a single upper wing bone - ironically the humerus - and the parrot would have been the size of a crow.

"As with many fragile bird fossils, it is a wonder that anything remains at all, and all that remains of this early Danish parrot is a single upper wing bone," Dr Waterhouse said.

"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."

However he said research suggests the Danish Blue would have differed slightly from parrots of today and would not have a hooked bill.

The Danish Blue is though to have lived around 10 million years after dinosaurs became extinct.

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