This seasonal diet matches a trait present in many modern birds. The Jeholornis specimens with whole seeds in their stomachs must have died during fruit season. When the fruit wasn’t in season, it would have eaten something different and harder and relied on a gizzard to crush them up. When the fruit was available, it would have eaten whole fruits, seeds and all, and then pooped out the un-crushed seeds. The findings, published in the journal eLife, suggest that Jeholornis was eating different foods at different times of the year.
What’s more, the seeds found in Jeholornis stomach cavities are whole, not crushed. Some specimens of Jeholornis have been found with gizzard stones, and some have been found with preserved seeds in their gut, but no one’s found a Jeholornis with both gizzard stones and seeds at the same time. They swallow stones to help them crush up their food.” “Birds that eat seeds have a gastric mill, a gizzard. However, Connor said: “You’re not actually going to be able to tell different diets apart from just the mandible shape.
To solve this, Hu scanned the skull of a specimen of Jeholornis and although it showed many similarities to dinosaurs, there were enough traits present, like mouth and beak, to suggest it could have eaten fruit.īy comparing a reconstructed skull of the ancient bird with that of modern birds, including species that grind and crack seeds and eat fruit but leave the seeds whole, she was able to rule out seed cracking. Hu added: “Clarifying between these two hypotheses is important since fruit consumption could result in co-evolutionary mutualism, whereas seed consumption does not.”Įating fruit and pooping out un-crushed seeds could help plants spread and evolve, but if the seeds were crushed-up and digested, that wouldn’t help the plants. “In this study, we wanted to figure out, was it feeding on seeds alone, or was it eating fruit?” “Then 17 years later, other scientists suggested that it wasn’t just eating seeds, but whole fruits, and only the seeds preserved, since they're harder. “These stomach contents were superficially identified as seeds, so people argued that it was eating seeds. They look like they exploded out of the stomach cavity. O’Connor said: “The first Jeholornis fossil that was described in 2002 has all these plant remains scattered around it. The time between the first Jeholornis and the first T rex is about the same as the amount of time separating the last T rex and modern humans. The second-most primitive known bird was a long-tailed, raven-sized creature called Jeholornis. (Illustration by Zhixin Han and Yifan Wang via SWNS) Illustration of cretaceous bird Jeholornis.
But other birds began evolving tens of millions of years earlier. The crown group of birds is the group that is alive today – Neornithes – and their direct ancestors. “This obstructs our understanding of the origins of this important plant-animal interaction.” Han Hu, of Oxford University, added: “Birds are important consumers of fruit today and play important roles in seed dispersal, but so far there has not been direct evidence of fruit consumption by early birds, outside the bird crown group. “This discovery about how and when birds started exploiting this resource could help explain why these kinds of plants are so dominant in our landscape today.” “Fruits are an incredible resource that everybody’s familiar with, and the plants that produce them are everywhere, but it wasn’t always that way. Jingmai O’Connor, of the Field Museum in Chicago, said: “This is the oldest evidence of fruit-eating in any animal. Hundreds of animals eat fruit now, but most fruit-bearing plants appeared only relatively recently in Earth’s history, showing up for the first time in the Cretaceous – the final period of the dinosaurs.īy comparing the skull shapes and stomach contents of fossilized birds, American scientists have discovered that a species called Jeholornis may have been one of the first creatures to eat fruit and may have helped spread these plants that are now so common worldwide. The earliest-known animal to eat fruit was an ancient bird that lived 120 million years ago, according to new research.