Primitive birds began to eat fruit and disperse seeds about 120 million years ago. About informs N+1.
Modern fruit-eating birds play a crucial role in plant reproduction due to the widespread dispersal of seeds eaten with their excrement. For zoologists, the history of the emergence of such a symbiotic relationship is a great mystery. It is known that birds became a large group of living things about 135 million years ago.
Han Hu of the University of Oxford and colleagues studied a sample of a primitive long-tailed bird. JeholornisFound in 2002 in China. Fossilized seeds were found inside, and therefore, scientists originally suggested that the bird was carnivorous, but could eat fruit. Now the research team has decided to put an end to this issue by restoring its anatomical structure. The authors scanned the skull using synchronous tomography and created its 3D model.
As a result of the morphometric analysis of the skull and mandible, the scientists immediately ruled out the option of crushing the seeds, but could not distinguish between grinding the seeds and eating fruit. To clear the doubt, the scientists compared the seeds discovered with seeds eaten by modern birds. The food in the digestive tracts of modern seed-eating birds is eroded and present with stomach stones. In contrast, in fruiting birds, the seeds are firm, rarely dispersed in the digestive tract, and accompanied by a few small stomach stones. Because the grains in the belly Jeholornis Scientists concluded that a primitive bird that lived 120 million years ago ate fruit. Thus, this bird is the oldest fruiting bird known.
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