Many are familiar with Monty Python’s skit about the “Norwegian Blue” parrot with “lovely plumage” that was “pining for the fjords.”
Fewer know that the Norwegian Blue actually did exist, apparently. However, it has now “joined the choir invisible,” as it has been extinct for many years. 55 million years, according to one Dr. Waterhouse, who made the finding. (I have doubts about his number, but that’s an other topic for an other time.)
The U.K.’s Daily Mail reported that Dr. Waterhouse noticed a fossilized bone among bird remains found in a mine in Denmark:
Research has now confirmed the bone was part of an upper wing
from a bird in the parrot family. Although the mine was in Denmark,
the birds would also have lived in what is now Norway.Dr Waterhouse, now assistant curator of natural history at the
Norfolk Museums Service, said: “All that remained was a single
upper wing bone, but it contained characteristic features that
showed it was clearly from a member of the parrot family, about the
size of a yellow-crested cockatoo.”…
Details of the Norwegian Blue have been published in the latest
issue of Paleontology journal, under the distinctly Pythonesque
title Two New Fossil Parrots (Psittaciformes) from the Lower Eocene
Fur Formation.
Now that’s what I call a dead parrot.
