A lower jaw from a Cretaceous parrot

Thomas A. Stidham ()
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Thomas A. Stidham: Museum of Paleontology, and Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, University of California, Berkeley

Nature, 1998, vol. 396, issue 6706, 29-30

Abstract: Abstract All known Cretaceous bird fossils representing modern higher taxa are from the aquatic groups Anseriformes1,3, Gaviiformes4,5, Procellariiformes1 and Charadriiformes1,6. Here I describe a toothless avian dentary symphysis (fused jawbone) from the latest Cretaceous of Wyoming, United States. This symphysis appears to represent the oldest known parrot and is, to my knowledge, the first known fossil of a ‘terrestrial’ modern bird group from the Cretaceous. The existence of this fossil supports the hypothesis, based on molecular divergence data7,8, that most or all of the major modern bird groups were present in the Cretaceous.

Date: 1998
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DOI: 10.1038/23841

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