The Earliest Bird To Sip a Flower 21
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Researchers have unearthed the earliest evidence of a bird sipping nectar from a flower. The stomach contents of the 47-million-year-old fossil flyer — a long-extinct species of perching bird — include hundreds of grains of pollen. The ancient pollen grains are large and apparently clumped together readily, a clue that the plant that bore the flowers was pollinated by creatures and not by the wind."
Re: (Score:3)
It seems unlikely (Score:2)
It seems unlikely this was actually the first bird to pollinate a flower. Since the pollen was already too large to carry on the wind that would imply that the plant had already adapted away from self pollination and towards external pollinators, a process unlikely to happen suddenly.
Re:It seems unlikely (Score:4, Informative)
The title is inaccurate, but the summary is accurate, as it states "the earliest evidence of" not "the first bird."
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The pollen already evolved to support pollination by the bird. So it was not the first.
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Could have been the first bird. Insects could have been doing it first though. They've been flying around much longer - before the dinosaurs even.
Everyone remembers... (Score:2, Funny)
the first bird that sipped their nectar!
Whew! (Score:2)
This question has been gnawing on me. I can sleep easy now.
Some missing information (Score:5, Informative)
The site is the wellknown Messel pit [wikipedia.org], an UNESCO World Nature Heritage site. The scientists were a team from the nearby Senckenberg Museum [senckenberg.de].
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No one said any organic material was found still intact. Pollen fossilises just like anything else.
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Are you trolling? Hard to tell sometimes. Seal anything off from oxygen exchange and it will degrade very slowly if at all. (There is canned food from the Civil War that is still eatable.) Complex molecules such as DNA that are inherently unstable will fall apart, but simpler organic compounds have no reason to disassociate. There are carbon compounds in meteorites that are ten times that age.
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Anger? I actually wondered, since if it were a troll it was fairly well-done. Looked at your posting history just now, and you instead appear to be a young-earth creationist. You should spend some time investigating the multiple different methods used for dating, they're quite interesting even if they do give results you don't like. There are at least three dozen different methods of varying complexity and accuracy, about ten of which are in common use. If at all possible researchers try to use more th