The earliest bird got the worm: new study finds a 120-million-year-old group of birds probably ate insects rather than fish
- Studying how prehistoric birds ate can offer scientists clues for how the animals came to dominate modern ecosystems
- The ancient bird had a strange snout with teeth, which scientists had assumed were used to catch fish
As the saying goes: “The early bird gets the worm”, and a new study from Hong Kong suggests a group of birds from 120 million years ago may have, in fact, eaten worms. Or, more precisely, invertebrates.
“Today, we have about 11,000 species of birds, and they live almost everywhere on the planet in almost any environment you could imagine,” said Michael Pittman, a palaeontologist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and an author of the study. “But actually understanding where that comes from is not very well-known.”
“We wanted to use as many lines of evidence as we can to reconstruct what early birds were eating,” he said.
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Before the study, scientists had assumed Longipteryx ate fish because they had teeth, which modern birds do not.