There are hundreds of animals that eat fruit. Fruit-bearing plants showed up for the first time in the final period of the dinosaurs. The first evidence of fruit consumption in birds was tracked down by comparing the skull shapes and stomach contents of fossils. The earliest known fruit-eater was a bird that lived 120 million years ago, and it may have contributed to the spread of plants.
"This is the oldest evidence of fruit-eating in any animal," says O'Connor, an associate curator of fossil reptiles at the Field Museum. It wasn't always that way, as fruits are an incredible resource that everyone is familiar with. The discovery of how and when birds started exploiting this resource could help explain why these kinds of plants are so dominant.
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. This makes it difficult for us to understand the origins of the plant- animal interaction.
The crown group of birds is made up of Neornithes and their ancestors. The second most primitive bird was a long-tailed raven. The amount of time between the first and last T. rex is the same.
According to O'Connor, the first Jeholornis fossil that was described in 2002 has all the plant remains scattered around it. People argued that the stomach contents were actually food. After 17 years, other scientists said it wasn't just eating seeds, but whole fruits and preserved seeds. We wanted to know if it was eating fruit or if it was just feeding on seeds.
"Clarifying between these two hypotheses is important since fruit consumption could result in co-evolutionary mutualism, whereas seed consumption does not," says Hu.
Hu had to look at many of the specimen at the Museum of Nature. She scanned the skull at the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organization's Australian Synchrotron.
The scans showed that Jeholornis's skull has many characteristics that are similar to a dinosaur. The skull had some features in it's mouth and beak that could be related to a modern diet of fruits and vegetables.
The skulls of modern birds, including species that grind seeds, cracked seeds, and species that eat fruits, were ruled out by the analyses.
According to O'Connor, you're not going to be able to tell different diet apart from the mandible shape. Additional clues can be found in other parts of the fossils. Birds with seeds have a gizzard. They use stones to crush their food.
No one has ever found a Jerholornis with both gizzard stones and seeds at the same time. The seeds found in the stomach are completely intact.
The findings show that he was eating different foods at different times. When there was fruit, it would have eaten whole fruits, seeds, and uncrushed seeds. It relied on a gizzard to crush fruit when it wasn't in season. The fruit season must have killed the specimen with the seeds in their stomach.
Many modern birds have a trait similar to this seasonal diet. O'Connor says that birds can change the proportions of their bicyle to adapt to different seasons. The first evidence of that is this.
The first fruit-eater, Jeholornis, was the first bird to help produce fruit. Birds may have been recruited for seed dispersal early on. The role of bird-plant interactions during the Terrestrial Revolution might be indicated by the fact that early frugivorous birds are highly mobile seed dispersalrs. Birds eating fruit and pooping out seeds far away from the parent plant can help fruit-bearing plants spread.
A long tail that could have worked like a rudder is one of the things that would have helped it fly. O'Connor theorizes that a diet of fruit may have put pressure on the Jeholornis to be better at flying. You have to be able to move around and see where the resources are if you want to eat them all.
She hopes that her research will inspire the research of paleontologists, ecologists, zoologists, and botanists who are interested in bird ecology. It is a flagship of applying multiple cutting-edge methods simultaneously to solve complex paleoecological questions which will inspire the future researchers to conduct similar analyses to reveal the extinct animals' ecologies.
More information: Han Hu et al, Earliest evidence for fruit consumption and potential seed dispersal by birds, eLife (2022). DOI: 10.7554/eLife.74751 Journal information: eLife
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