Norwegian Blue Parrot is Real and Quite Dead

Well no matter how you slice it, that bird has “ceased to be.”

Monty Python’s ‘dead parrot’ once lived after all
From The Times | May 16, 2008 | Fran Yeoman

Monty Python’s parrot may have been “bleedin’ demised” when that sketch was performed in 1969, but an unlikely discovery suggests that it was once alive and well.

The “Norwegian blue” that Michael Palin claimed was not dead, but simply “shagged out following a prolonged squawk”, may not have been such a ridiculous invention as the comedians intended.

David Waterhouse, a palaeontologist from Norfolk, believes that he has identified the oldest known parrot fossil and, at the same time, proved that the birds once lived considerably farther north than was previously thought.

The bone in question, which is 55 million years old, was found in a quarry on the Isle of Mors, Denmark. After inspecting the fossil of a single upper-wing bone, which is fittingly called the humerus, Dr Waterhouse has concluded that parrots did indeed once squawk around the edges of the North Sea.

“Obviously, we are dealing with a bird that is ‘bereft of life’, but the tricky bit is establishing that it was a parrot,” he said. But after careful inspection, Dr Waterhouse is confident that the bone is from a parrot.

“This small bone contains characteristic features that show that it is clearly from a member of the parrot family, about the size of a yellow-crested cockatoo,” he said.

Although the bird has been officially named Mopsitta tanta, Dr Waterhouse has nicknamed it the Danish blue, a tribute to its fictional Norwegian counterpart in the Python routine, which has been voted Britain’s best-loved alternative comedy sketch.

This particular parrot, however, would never have “pined for the fjords”, as Palin’s indignant shopkeeper insisted. “It’s a lovely image,” said Dr Waterhouse, 29. “But we can say with certainty that it did not. This parrot shuffled off its mortal coil around 55 million years ago, but the fjords of Norway were formed during the last Ice Age and are less than a million years old.”

Dr Waterhouse, assistant curator of Natural History at Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, made the discovery in 2005 while he was a PhD student at University College Dublin.

While working in Denmark, he visited a small museum on the Isle of Mors, in Jutland, where the bone had lain unidentified since it was found two years earlier in an opencast mine used to quarry soft rock for cat litter.

His paper about the find, with the distinctly Pythonesque title Two New Fossil Parrots (Psittaciformes) from the Lower Eocene Fur Formation in Denmark, was published yesterday in the Journal of Palaeontology.

Dr Waterhouse said that the discovery added weight to the argument that parrots may have evolved in the north, given that the oldest southern hemisphere parrot fossils are only 15 million years old.

“It isn’t as unbelievable as you might at first think that a parrot was found so far north,” he said. “When Mopsitta was alive, most of Northern Europe was experiencing a warm period, with a large, shallow tropical lagoon covering much of Germany, southeast England and Denmark. We have to remember that this was only ten million years after the dinosaurs were wiped out, and some strange things were happening with animal life all over the planet.”

Research suggests that the crow-sized parrot would have differed slightly from the parrots of today and would not have had a hooked bill. The colour of its plumage is unknown but, as a Python fan, Dr Waterhouse insists on blue.

Palin reportedly chuckled when he was told about the research, adding: “All I can say is that it just shows that nothing is original.”