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Abstract/Summary
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<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>A partial skeleton of the putative stem group roller <jats:italic>Septencoracias</jats:italic> is described from the early Eocene London Clay of Walton-on-the-Naze (Essex, UK). With an age of about 55 million years, the bones represent one of the earliest fossil records of a coraciiform bird. The new fossil reveals that the proximal pedal phalanges of the three anterior toes of <jats:italic>Septencoracias</jats:italic> exhibit markedly widened distal ends. This distinctive trait is not found in other representatives of the Coracii, but occurs in the Meropidae (bee-eaters). The quadrate likewise exhibit a derived characteristic of the Meropidae, and the beak is narrower than in rollers. These previously unnoticed features are of particular interest, because the Meropidae result as the sister taxon of the Coracii in sequence-based analyses. Calibrated molecular data suggest that the divergence between the Coracii and the Meropidae occurred at 55.6 Ma, with the new fossil being only slightly younger than this date. However, phylogenetic analyses recovered <jats:italic>Septencoracias</jats:italic> within the Coracii, so that the derived features shared with the Meropidae most likely are either plesiomorphic and were lost in the Coracii, or they represent parallelisms that evolved convergently in <jats:italic>Septencoracias</jats:italic> and the Meropidae. In any case, these traits suggest that <jats:italic>Septencoracias</jats:italic> differed from extant rollers in its ecological preferences and foraging mode.</jats:p>
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Hinweis
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DeepGreen-ID: 3d68b7875df14ff0aeda22b37710f7e3 ; metadata provieded by: DeepGreen (https://www.oa-deepgreen.de/api/v1/), LIVIVO search scope life sciences (http://z3950.zbmed.de:6210/livivo), Crossref Unified Resource API (https://api.crossref.org/swagger-ui/index.html), to.science.api (https://frl.publisso.de/), ZDB JSON-API (beta) (https://zeitschriftendatenbank.de/api/), lobid - Dateninfrastruktur für Bibliotheken (https://lobid.org/resources/search)
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