Read more at: A top avian predator’s surprising past
A top avian predator’s surprising past
20 January 2020
A single fossil bone found in Japan is ruffling a few feathers in the world of avian palaeontology. It belongs to a relative of the little auk or dovekie, today the most common seabird and top avian predator in the Atlantic and Arctic Oceans. At around 700,000 years old, the fossil’s presence in Japan indicates that during the ‘Ice Age’, the little auk had a much wider range that extended into the Pacific. Discovered by Junya Watanabe of the Department of Earth Sciences in the University of Cambridge and colleagues from Japan’s Kyoto University, the find raises the question of why such a successful, competitive and adaptive seabird should have suffered such a significant reduction in range.