About Parrot Origins and evolution

Researchers are regarding about the origins of parrots. Psittaciforme diversity in South America and Australasia suggests that the order might have evolved in Gondwanaland, centered in Australasia. The scarcity of parrots in the fossil record, however, presents difficulties in proving so.

A single 15 mm fragment from a large lower bill, found in deposits from the Lance Creek Formation in Niobrara County, Wyoming, had been thought to be the oldest parrot fossil and is presumed to have originated from the Late Cretaceous period that makes it about 70 million years old. There have been studies, though, that establishes that this fossil is almost certainly not from a bird, however from a caenagnathid theropod or a non-avian dinosaur with a birdlike beak.

It is now generally assumed that the Psittaciformes, or their common ancestors with variety of related bird orders, were present somewhere in the world around the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, some 65 mya. If so, they probably had not evolved their morphological autapomorphies yet, but were generalized arboreal birds, almost like similar to today's potoos or frogmouths.

Though these birds are a phylogenetically challenging group, they appear at least closely to the parrot ancestors than as an example the modern aquatic birds. The present-day combined proof is widely in support of the hypothesis of Psittaciformes being "near passerines"; i.e. they actually certainly belong to the radiation of mostly land-living birds that emerged in close proximity to the K-Pg extinction.

They have been variously allied to groups such as falcons, songbirds, trogons, woodpeckers, as also as "Coraciiformes", hawks and owls, and the puzzling moosebirds. This looks to be by and large correct. Other proposed relationships, such as to pigeons, are considered more spurious today.

Europe is that the origin of the first presumed parrot fossils, which date from about 50 million years ago (mya). The climate there and then was tropical, consistent with the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Initially, a neoavian named Mopsitta Tanta, uncovered in Denmark's Early Eocene

Fur Formation and dated to 54 mya, was assigned to the Psittaciformes; it was described from a single humerus. However, the rather nondescript bone is not unequivocally Psittaciformes, and more recently it absolutely was out that it may rather belong to a newly-discovered ibis of the genus Rhynchaeites, whose fossil legs be found in the same deposits.