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The Earliest Bird To Sip a Flower
sciencehabit (1205606) writes "Researchers have unearthed the earliest evidence of a bird sipping nectar from a flower. The stomach contents of the 47-million-year-old fossil flyer — a long-extinct species of perching bird — include hundreds of grains of pollen. The ancient pollen grains are large and apparently clumped together readily, a clue that the plant that bore the flowers was pollinated by creatures and not by the wind."
The title is inaccurate, but the summary is accurate, as it states "the earliest evidence of" not "the first bird."
the first bird that sipped their nectar!
Nope. Pollen = plant sperm. There would not be enough genetic material to successfully recreate the plant without the female gametes (notwithstanding the fact that after 47 million years the likelihood of enough surviving DNA is very small)
The site is the wellknown Messel pit, an UNESCO World Nature Heritage site. The scientists were a team from the nearby Senckenberg Museum.
Are you trolling? Hard to tell sometimes. Seal anything off from oxygen exchange and it will degrade very slowly if at all. (There is canned food from the Civil War that is still eatable.) Complex molecules such as DNA that are inherently unstable will fall apart, but simpler organic compounds have no reason to disassociate. There are carbon compounds in meteorites that are ten times that age.
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