Hundreds of animals eat fruit, from toucans to fruit bats to maned wolves to humans. But most fruit-bearing plants evolved relatively recently in Earth’s history, showing up for the first time in the Cretaceous, the final period of the dinosaurs. In a new paper in eLife, scientists have tracked down the first fossil evidence of fruit consumption by comparing the skull shapes and stomach contents of fossil birds. The verdict: the earliest-known fruit-eater was an early bird called Jeholornis that lived 120 million years ago, and it may have helped contribute to the spread of the plants that dominate the world today.
Click here for original story, The early bird gets the fruit: Fossil provides earliest evidence of fruit-eating by any animal
Source: Phys.org