''Pumiliornis tessellatus'' is an ancient bird from the Middle Eocene of

Messel Messel is a municipality in the district of Darmstadt-Dieburg in Hesse near Frankfurt am Main in Germany. The village is first mentioned, as ''Masilla'', in the Lorsch codex. Messel was the property of the lords of Groschlag from ca. 1400 to 1799 ...

Hesse, Germany Hesse (, , ) or Hessia (, ; german: Hessen ), officially the State of Hessen (german: links=no, Land Hessen), is a state in Germany. Its capital city is Wiesbaden, and the largest urban area is Frankfurt. Two other major historic cities are Darm ...

. It is described as a

wren Wrens are a family of brown passerine birds in the predominantly New World family Troglodytidae. The family includes 88 species divided into 19 genera. Only the Eurasian wren occurs in the Old World, where, in Anglophone regions, it is commonly ...

-sized

anisodactyl In biology, dactyly is the arrangement of digits (fingers and toes) on the hands, feet, or sometimes wings of a tetrapod animal. It comes from the Greek word δακτυλος (''dáktylos'') = "finger". Sometimes the ending "-dactylia" is use ...

bird with a long, slender bill and strong hallux. Its species name ''tessellatus'', meaning "mosaic" in Latin, is a reference to its unusual distribution of characters and uncertain phylogenetic placement. It has some anatomical affinities with Cuculiformes, but similar fossils that might be related to this taxon do not. In 2014, a new specimen of ''Pumiliornis'' was described that showed preserved stomach contents of

pollen Pollen is a powdery substance produced by seed plants. It consists of pollen grains (highly reduced microgametophytes), which produce male gametes (sperm cells). Pollen grains have a hard coat made of sporopollenin that protects the gametophyt ...

grains from a eudicotyledonous

angiosperm Flowering plants are plants that bear flowers and fruits, and form the clade Angiospermae (), commonly called angiosperms. The term "angiosperm" is derived from the Greek words ('container, vessel') and ('seed'), and refers to those plants th ...

, making it the earliest fossil evidence of flower-visiting behavior in birds.

References

{{Taxonbar, from=Q16688836 Eocene birds Prehistoric birds of Europe Fossil taxa described in 1999 Prehistoric bird genera