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TOPIC: Eggshell in Amber

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Dec 19 01:49 2007

Hummingbird	Permalink

The "rediscovery" of a stunningly-preserved 30 million-year-old hummingbird fossil in southern France has deepened the mystery of why these fragile creatures disappeared from Europe and now exist only on the American continent. The fossil was originally found by an amateur palaeontologist at the end of the 1980s in the Lubéron national park in Provence. It then lay in his private collection for a number of years, unknown to the wider world and as good as undiscovered. It was finally "re-discovered" after its purchase by another amateur palaeontologist, Nicolas Tourment, a long-time colleague of Antoine Louchart who is an expert on bird fossils. Read more __________________

Blobrana

L

Posts: 131433

Date: Sep 12 10:36 2007

Eggshell in Amber	Permalink

In the past year, a Corvallis entomologist has discovered the oldest known bee, mushroom and a chemical-spewing beetle. Now, George Poinar has come up with another ancient discovery: the oldest vertebrate eggshell, most likely that of a hummingbird. The quarter-inch-long eggshell -- its chick hatched through the egg's missing top -- is trapped in amber, or fossilised tree resin, from the Dominican Republic that is about 30 million years old. If it's indeed a hummingbird shell, it would represent the oldest evidence of the tiny bird in the Americas. Read more __________________

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