Wonderful collection of Fossilized birds from 55 million years ago have been bequeathed to the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh and includes dozens of types that unknown to science.
Dating from the start of Eocene era, they represent the early stages in evolution of modern birds.
The collection assembled by the late Michael Daniels, an amateur paleontology enthusiast, is described as one of the most important of his type in in world. Such is its scope that it will take several years to work and describe all samples, but initial analysis suggests at least 50 new variety.
Dr. Andrew Kitchener, NMS Chief Curator. of vertebrates, told Observer: “This is so exciting, wonderful collection. A little of birds have characteristics that are now found in different modern families of birds – mixed up together.”
Importance of the collection “cannot be overestimated,” Kitchener said, both in UK where there is no comparable site for bird fossils and more. Samples are everything more wondering because despite being buried in clay for millions of years they are kept in three dimensions. Usually on other sites found in collapsed state.
Kitchener paid tribute to Daniels who promised an inheritance a few months before his death last September, 90 years. Happy Daniels various jobs included a cabinetmaker and locksmith, but his passion was paleontology, which took him from him home in Lawton near Epping Forest to the fossil sites outside London and other places in southern England. In the 1970s he developed a more special interest in Eocene London clay – the period after the extinction of the dinosaurs. After retirement in 1985 he moved to Holland-on-Sea so he can pursue this interest in nearby Walton-on-the-Naze, where the prominent London Clay formation is located.
he hit up Friendship with Kitchener 25 years ago, after he and his wife Pam moved to Edinburgh, where they daughter Caroline lived
Having visited the NMS, they met kitchener, who recalled: “He said:” I would like see your collection of Eocene birds. I said “I would like show you, but we don’t have them. Then he went on tell me about your huge collection.”
Kitchener remembers him as a friendly man. who was mostly self-taught, but knew his subject and had special skill in looking for out fossils from nondescript pieces of clay is blurred out of Naze rocks. “Before, only random random bones were found. found there, but Michael found hundreds of more-or less complete broken bones skeletons of from the large archaic ancestor of the falcon to tiny hummingbird-sized skeletons of a bird that looks like a swift.
Daniels calculated that he had driven 27,000 miles and walked 1,590 miles. on field trips to Waltonon-the-Naze collect 15 tons of London Clay. Kitchener said: “The extraction, processing, sifting and drying of the residue was painstaking. tasks. Separating the relevant finds and combining the fragments into a kind of coherence required his watchmaker…like skills with a binocular microscope, probes and tweezers, so that he was even able to extract the bones of the middle ear of little birds.”
Several of in the world leading natural history museums offered to provide permanent home for collection, but Daniels resisted all advances.
Kitchener said: “He trusted me that we would take good care of the collection. He also asked what we work with [avian palaeontologist] Dr. Gerald Mayr in Germany to make the collection work on”.
mayr, of The Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main stated: “The importance of The Michael Daniels collection cannot be overestimated. There is nothing like it in Great Britain, of course, and this is comparable to other places rich in birds. in USA, China and Germany.
” fact that so many copies survived in three dimensions make it one of the most important collections of his type in in world”.
He has just published articles on two kinds in Collection, one of who pays tribute Daniels: Danielsraptor phorusrhacoidesbig ancient falcon with narrow beak and long legs that looked more like caracara from America than kestrel or peregrine falcon.
Another Nasidytes ypresianusis an ancestor of diver or loon, except that, unlike the modern diver, he did not have a narrow dagger.like beak, and its jaws were wider.
kitchener added what in During the Eocene epoch, the climate was much warmer than today, which may explain the huge diversity of bird species in Walton-on-the-Naze is “more like what would you see in Amazon rainforest than Essex of Today”.
Once the collection has been fully explored, NMS hopes to put on an exhibition, with reconstruction of birds as they would have looked 55 million years ago.
