Hummingbirds in Europe? While the only hummingbirds you'll see flying around Europe these days have probably escaped from captivity, hummingbirds lived wild and free in present-day Germany and in other parts of Europe, Asia and Africa more than 30 million years ago. A scientist discovered fossilized bird skeletons from Germany that are the world's oldest known evidence of creatures that looked like today's hummingbirds
Finding these bones in Europe is especially exciting. They are the first bones with a modern hummingbird design ever found outside of North, Central or South America.
Mayr named the new hummingbird species Eurotrochilus inexpectatus, which means an "unexpected European version of Trochilus." Trochilus is the name of a group of today's hummingbirds.
Previously, the oldest fossils of hummingbirds were 1-million-year-old specimens recovered from cave deposits in Central America, reports sciencenews.org
Mayr explains. "This is the oldest convincing record of modern-type hummingbirds." Indeed, the next oldest fossils of modern hummingbirds, discovered in South America, date to just one million years ago.
"The amazing thing about this fossil is that it's essentially a modern hummingbird," Margaret Rubega of the University of Connecticut told Science. "My mind is a little blown."
"Fossils of primitive hummingbirds have been found in the Old World before, but it was a great surprise to find a bird that looked so similar to the modern hummingbirds of the Old World," Dr Mayr, of the Senkenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, told BBC News Online.
Other fossil hummingbirds have been found in Central America, Europe and Asia, but they are either very different from modern ones or are known from just a few bones
They share key anatomical features on their wings with modern hummingbirds. The primitive hummingbird Jungornis tesselatus lacks these features.
This suggests that Eurotrochilus and modern hummingbirds belong together in a distinct group of birds, while Jungornis belongs to another, more primitive group.
Por isso nenhuma descoberta fóssil consegue falsear a evolução.A flexibilidade que a teoria tem de criar Ad Hocs e reajustar a árvore filogenética é impressionante.
Por que voces não adimitem que era um colibri moderno e ficou em estasis por 30 milhões de anos ao invés de ficar fazendo um papelão ?