When you guess of Siberia , you plausibly retrieve bear , cold-blooded , and more insensate . The last thing you ’d imagine is tropic birds .
However , paleontologists from the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow , have discovered a parrot fossil on an island in Baikal Lake , Irkutsk Region in Eastern Siberia , which dates to between 16 - 18 million year ago . Although they only discovered the fossilize leg of the bird , they believe it was probably the sizing of a budgerigar .
As well as being the first parrot dodo to be unearthed in that street corner of the world , it ’s the northern - most fossil grounds of this kind of bird we ’ve ever do across .
" No - one before has ever find grounds of their presence in Siberia , " study author Dr Nikita Zelenkov told theBBC .
" We were excavating all kinds of animals there , and mostly they were rodents , rhinos , cat , hippo and others . But this vicinity is also interesting because it preserves a rich community of interests of fossil birds . But no exotic birds have been find there before , " he summate .
So what the hell was this parrot doing there then ? The study of this curious case is published in the journalBiology Letters .
The Siberian parrot , top impart , compared to other parrot fogy from the Early Miocene . Nikita V Zelenkov/ Russian Academy of Sciences / Biology Letters
Nowadays , parrots are only course happen in tropical , sub - tropical , and a few temperate environment ( see mapping below ) . During the EarlyMioceneepoch , when this parrot is believe to have been animated , Siberia was notably warm than its notoriously bitter clime today . The authors mention , however , " that the front of parrot alone can not serve as an indication of especially tender climate . "
This strange find could provide some hints at how parrot unfold throughout the humanity , as they have a very limited fossil track record . The work say that some evolutionary models suggest that parrots pay back to the Americas from Africa through long - draw flight across the Indian Ocean . With this discovery , it ’s now plausible they actually may have traveled a flight path through Eurasia via the Bering Straight . It also supports the idea that parrots could have once been widespread throughout prehistorical Eurasia .
The modern statistical distribution of parrots shown in black , with this uncovering exhibit by the smutty hotshot . Nikita V Zelenkov/ Russian Academy of Sciences / Biology letter of the alphabet
