image: These are comparisons of three long bones between fossil (left) and modern (right) Eastern Bluebird. view more
Credit: <i>PNAS</i>
Researchers report that Late Pleistocene fossils of Eastern bluebirds and Hispaniolan crossbills from the Bahamian island of Abaco, where these birds are now extinct, are morphologically similar to extant members of those species from continental North America and the island of Hispaniola, respectively, and that these two species likely did not survive the sea level rise, climate warming and wetting, and loss of pine grasslands that occurred in the Bahamas during the Pleistocene-Holocene Transition.
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Article #17-07660: "Origin, paleoecology, and extirpation of bluebirds and crossbills in the Bahamas across the last glacial-interglacial transition," by David Steadman and Janet Franklin.
MEDIA CONTACT: Janet Franklin, University of California, Riverside, CA; tel: 951-827-4619; e-mail: janet.franklin@ucr.edu; David W. Steadman, Florida Museum of Natural History, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; tel: 407-913-7615; e-mail: dws@flmnh.ufl.edu
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences