About Parrots

(The term "true parrot" is not used by the majority of bird keepers, biologists and lay people and is a source of confusion. It is often easier to say "Family Psittacidae" to refer to this group.)

All members of the order have a generally erect stance and a characteristic curved beak shape with the upper mandible having slight mobility in the joint with the skull. All parrots are zygodactyl, with two toes at the front of each foot and two at the back, and all parrot eggs are white in color.

Parrots can be found in most warm regions of the world, including India, southeast Asia, Souther regions of North America, South America, and west Africa. By far the greatest number of parrot species come from Australasia, South America, and Central America. No parrot's natural range currently extends into the United States, although the Carolina Parakeet and Thick-billed Parrot once ranged into southern states.

Parrot Origins

A single 15 mm fragment from a lower bill (UCMP 143274), found in Lance Creek Formation deposits of Niobrara County, Wyoming, has been suggested as the first parrot fossil. Of Late Cretaceous age, it is about 70 million years old. But subsequent reviews have established that this fossil is almost certainly from a caenagnathid theropod - a group of non-avian dinosaurs with a birdlike beak - and not from a bird.

It is now generally assumed that the Psittaciformes or their common ancestors with a bunch of related bird orders were present somewhere on the world around the K-Pg extinction event, some 65 mya (million years ago). If so, they probably had not evolved their morphological autapomorphies yet, but were generalized arboreal birds, roughly similar (though not necessarily closely related) to today's potoos or frogmouths (see also Palaeopsittacus below).

Europe is the origin of the first generally accepted parrot fossils. They date from the Eocene, starting around 50 mya (million years ago). Several fairly complete skeletons of parrot-like birds have been found in England and Germany. Some uncertainty remains, but on the whole it seems more likely that these are not true ancestors of the modern parrots, but related lineages which evolved in the Northern Hemisphere but have since died out.

These are probably not "missing links" between ancestral and modern parrots, but rather psittaciform lineages that evolved parallel to true parrots and cockatoos and had their own peculiar autapomorphies

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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