Buenos Aires.- A team of Argentine paleontologists found a prehistoric woodpecker fossil, the most complete in South America, which is over 200,000 years old and will be exhibited in the coming days at the Fray Manuel de Torres Museum, in San Pedro, in the province of Buenos Aires.
As reported by the institution on Monday, the specimen is slightly larger than current woodpeckers and was found in a rough stone quarry under strata dating back a million years.
The discoverers of this find were José Luis Aguilar, director of the museum, and Silvina Carro, who came across small pieces of the bird wrapped in a brown rocky ledge during a routine outing.
After cutting out part of the sediments and carrying out the first cleaning tasks, the museum team found a practically complete fossilized bird inside the rock, since it has the entire left side, skull and jaws, as well as most of the bones. from her body.
«The delicate parts have been preserved in a fine silt that was transformed into rock; its antiquity is greater than 200,000 years, since it was found in sediments deposited at the base of a geological age called Buenos Aires,” Aguilar explained about the finding.
According to the paleontologist, the bones were articulated in a life position, in a small space measuring 16 centimeters long by four centimeters wide, with the skull and jaws turned back, while the left arm contracted and the bird’s hind leg remained elongated. In addition, the spaces where the feathers were inserted can be seen in the ulna.
“This finding provides a unique specimen for the study of this group of birds. Its skull and limbs will reveal data that will fill existing gaps in the fossil record of these birds,” said the co-author of the discovery.
At the moment, the prehistoric woodpecker belonging to the Picidae family -which includes 28 genera and 216 species- is being studied by Jorge Noriega, one of the most renowned fossil bird researchers in Argentina.
This type of bird was distributed in regions of North America, part of Central America and South America, as well as in Eurasia, Africa, the Middle East and Indomalasia.
«The global fossil record of woodpeckers is very scarce and comprises fragmentary material represented mainly by few skeletal elements. The South American record is even poorer,” Noriega remarked.
