#Eurotrochilus noniewiczi

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Eurotrochilus

By Scott Reid

Etymology: European Hummingbird

First Described By: Mayr, 2004

Classification: Dinosauromorpha, Dinosauriformes, Dracohors, Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoromorpha, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostaylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes, Neognathae, Neoaves, Strisores, Daedalornithes, Apodiformes, Trochilidae

Referred Species: E. inexpectatus, E. noniewiczi

Status: Extinct

Time and Place: Between 31 and 28 million years ago, in the Rupelian of the Oligocene 

Eurotrochilus is known from the Menilite Formation, the Bott-Eder Grube Unterfeld, and Le Grand Banc locations across Poland, Germany, and France 

Physical Description: Eurotrochilus is a bird that is remarkable precisely because, to us, it is utterly unremarkable. Put in a clearer way, Eurotrochilus is almost identical to living Hummingbirds - but it’s thirty million years old. An extremely small bird, Eurotrochilus had wings shaped like hummingbirds - small, triangular, and built for hovering flight. It was about nine centimeters in length, making it as big as living hummingbirds like the Ruby-Throated Hummingbird. In addition to having small, triangular wings, Eurotrochilus had tiny legs, like living Hummingbirds, and a very long beak. So, its identical nature to living hummingbirds points to the hummingbird body plan as an ancient one, that hasn’t been improved upon much during the Cenozoic era. Still, it wasn’t a true hummingbird yet - aka in the group that contains modern hummingbirds and those more closely related to one sort than the other - because it still had long finger bones, and smaller connections between those bones. So, while the general hummingbird shape was present for thirty million years, it still had some modifications left to go.

Diet: With its very long, specialized bill, Eurotrochilus would have fed on nectar, like living hummingbirds.

Behavior: We can be fairly confident that Eurotrochilus was capable of hovering, and did so with some regularity; it would hover near flowers and rarely perch on them while gathering nectar up with its long beak. The beak would go into the center of the flower to draw up nectar, and in the process Eurotrochilus would pick up pollen. Then, upon going to the next flower to drink more nectar, Eurotrochilus would drop off the pollen, thus helping the flowers to reproduce. It would have spent most of its time hovering, and when not hovering would rest on branches or in more foliage-filled areas. It would have been a fairly active animal, and loud as well, making a variety of chirps and calls to one another. They probably would have been very brightly colored, like living hummingbirds, and the males probably wouldn’t have been very involved in nest care. 

By Ripley Cook

Ecosystem: Eurotrochilus primarily lived in forested areas, near lagoons, lakes, and estruary-filled areas. These lush habitats were filled with a variety of flowering plants for Eurotrochilus to feed on, and the forests were densely populated with birches, oaks, cypresses, conifers, palms, roses, asterids, and beeches. Eurotrochilus was a common site in these environments, which featured a variety of birds that resembled living forms and yet, were not quite like their modern counterparts. In the Bott-Eder environment of Germany, a coastal bay area, Eurotrochilus lived with birds such as the barbet Rupelramphastoides, the buttonquail Turnipax, the tody Palaeotodus, the mousebird Oligocolius, the trogon Primotrogon, the loon Colymboides, the seabird Rueplornis, and the songbird Wieslochia. This is a notable environment with a variety of transitional tree and ocean going birds, making it a fascinating habitat in which to study the evolution of dinosaurs in the Cenozoic. There were also sea cows, bats, and a Hyaenodont Apterodon, though Eurotrochilus would have been so small its unlikely that the Hyaenodont would have posed a problem for it. In the dense lake environment of Menilite, Eurotrochilus lived with the passerines Jamna, Resoviaornis, and Winnicavis, as well as the woodpecker Picavus. Here there was an extensive amount of thermal activity, which would negatively affect the ecosystem with gas bubbles and oil wells. In the lagoon environment of Le Grand, there was also Primotrogon, the early cuckoo Eocuculus, the crane Parvigrus, and the stem-passerine Zygodactylus.

Other: As the oldest representative of a proper, nectar-eating hummingbird shape, Eurotrochilus is vital for our understanding of the evolution of hummingbirds. In fact, its presence points to the idea that flowers pollinated by birds co-evolved with hummingbirds in the Eastern Hemisphere, even though hummingbirds aren’t present on that side of the globe today. Hummingbirds like Eurotrochilus, however, disappeared from that half of the globe during tropical climate collapse in Europe and the effects of the ice age. Interestingly enough, they were replaced in the Eastern Hemisphere by Sunbirds, a group of passerines that convergently evolved similar adaptations for hovering and nectar-eating, and also brightly colored feathers.

Species Differences: The two species of Eurotrochilus mainly differ on the proportions of the limbs, with E. noniewiczi having longer upper arm bones than E. inexpecattus, but shorter lower arm bones. They lived at the same time and fairly close to each other, so this difference is important in telling apart the varying kinds of these early hummingbirds.

~ By Meig Dickson

Sources Under the Cut 

Bochenski, Zygmunt; Bochenski, Zbigniew (19 December 2007). "An Old World hummingbird from the Oligocene: a new fossil from Polish Carpathians". Journal of Ornithology. 149 (2): 211

Bochenski, Zbigniew M.; Tomek, Teresa (10 December 2013). "A review of avain remains from the Oligocene of the Outer Carpathians and Central Paleogene Basin". Proceed. 8th Internat. Meeting Society of Avian Paleontology and Evolution.

Louchart, Antoine; Tourment, Nicolas; Carrier, Julie; Roux, Thierry (27 September 2007). "Hummingbird with modern feathering: an exceptionally well-preserved Oligocene fossil from southern France". Naturwissenschaften. 95 (2): 171–175.  

Mayr, Gerald (7 May 2004). "Old World Fossil Record of Modern-Type Hummingbirds". Science. 304 (5672): 861–874.

Mayr, Gerald (March 2005). "Fossil hummingbirds in the Old World". Biologist. 52 (1): 16.

Mayr, Gerald (25 July 2006). "New specimens of the early Oligocene Old World hummingbird Eurotrochilus inexpectatus". Journal of Ornithology. 148 (1): 105–111.

Mayr, Gerald (8 September 2009). "New specimens of the avian taxa Eurotrochilus (Trochilidae) and Palaeotodus (Todidae) from the early Oligocene of Germany". Springer. 84 (3): 387–395.  

Mayr, G. 2009. Paleogene Fossil Birds. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.

Mayr, G. 2017. Avian Evolution: The Fossil Record of Birds and its Paleobiological Significance. Topics in Paleobiology, Wiley Blackwell. West Sussex.

Maxwell, Erin E. (1 December 2016). "The Rauenberg fossil Lagerstätte (Baden-Württemberg, Germany): A window into early Oligocene marine and coastal ecosystems of Central Europe". Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology. 463.  

Prum, Richard O.; Berv, Jacob S.; Dornberg, Alex; Field, Daniel J.; Townsend, Jeffrey P.; Lemmon, Emily Moriarty; Lemmon, Alan R. (2015). "A comprehensive phylogeny of birds (Aves) using targeted next-generation DNA sequencing". Nature. 526: 569–573.

Reddy, Sushma; et al. (2015). "Why do phylogenomic data sets yield conflicting trees? Data type influences the avian tree of life more than taxon sampling". Systematic Biology. 66 (5): 857–879.