Frugivorous birds
My daughter is a rock person. She likes rocks. And fossils. So having been selected by her school to join the New College Step-Up Programme, and having been taken on a two-day trip to Oxford to be shown around the university, I found myself last week at the Oxford University Department of Earth Sciences open day, where I picked up a copy of their magazine and was fascinated to learn about Jeholornis.
Jeholornis is the second most primitive known bird, and was a long-tailed, raven-sized creature that lived 120 million years ago. I’m guessing Jeholornis lived somewhere around China, because there are lots of fossilised specimens in the Shandong Tianyu Museum of Nature. One Chinese researcher based in the Department of Earth Sciences has been scanning fossilised Jeholornis skulls to try to work out whether this early bird was a seed cracker or a seed grinder, or whether it simply swallowed the seeds whole while in the process of eating the whole fruit.
I actually didn’t know until I read this article that any birds ate fruit, other than small berries (mainly on Christmas cards). But toucans apparently do and as we all know, two can do what what a toucan can do…
The reason this is important to know is that fruit-eating by early birds could result in something called ‘co-evolutionary mutualism’. That’s a fancy term for evolutionary symbiosis, or put another way, helping each other along a bit. The fruit feeds the bird and the bird spreads the seeds in its poo.
The seeds inside Jeholornis poo were all intact (rather than crushed or ground), and so Jeholornis may have played an important role in the spread of early fruiting plants. Jeholornis was a ‘highly-mobile seed-disperser’ during the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. Bird-plant interactions may have helped angiosperm plants to take over the world! Phew… :-D
Anyway after that and a few rapid-fire taster lectures on moon rocks, ocean undercurrents and why you never want to meet an alien, we retired exhausted to Christchurch Meadows for a picnic, where a very bold squirrel approached us and waggled its tail cutely until I gave it a piece of my mango. Well, I never knew squirrels could eat fruit but this one sat and ate it like all its birthdays had come at once. I just had to give it a second piece, which it consumed equally enthusiastically.
Ho hum… what can we conclude from all of this?? Maybe that if you ever feel sad about global warming and the relative lack of fruit trees in our world, all you have to do is
HU, H., 2026. New Study Reveals the Earliest Evidence of Fruit-eating by Birds. The University of Oxford Department of Earth Sciences Magazine. Issue Number 09. Winter 2022, pp. 22-23.