'Quite a treasure': Scientists find 4,200-year-old bird preserved in glacial ice
Scientists in Norway have discovered the almost perfectly preserved remains of a bird that soared the skies 4,200 years ago.
"It was very exciting," Jorgen Rosvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, told As It Happens guest host Rosemary Barton.
"It looks almost fresh. It looks like it died just yesterday or a few weeks ago — but, actually, it's over 4,000 years old."
Fant 4200 år gammel trost begravd i isen. – Det ser ut som om den døde i fjor <a href="https://t.co/eHiLBdRETI">https://t.co/eHiLBdRETI</a> <a href="https://t.co/gZh57WQxrw">pic.twitter.com/gZh57WQxrw</a>
—@NRKnoThe ancient redwing thrush was found by an employee of Norway's environment ministry on a snow bank in the Oppdal mountains, Rosvold said.
He said the creature must have been buried in the snow soon after it died and remained there, frozen in glacial ice, for thousands of years.
It wasn't until they had the bird's feathers carbon-dated that scientists realized what a significant discovery they had on their hands.
"At first, I had to call the lab and just check if they were correct with the age because I didn't think it could be that old," Rosvold said. "But it was correct and it's, yeah, just fabulous."
When he and his colleagues examined the remains more closely, he was again shocked by what they found.
"We dissected it last week, just to see if there was anything at all inside it or if it's just a big porridge of rotten intestines," he said.
"Everything was intact inside. We can take out the heart. We can take out the lungs. We can take out the kidneys and even the intestines in one piece. That was a big surprise as well."
The implications for scientific study are huge, he said.
"That means we can study a lot of the biology and the history of the bird and we can compare the bird that lived essentially in the Stone Age to birds that are living here today," he said.
"We can look at the effects of pollution and we look at the DNA to see if it's changed a lot and we can look at the diet of the bird and the parasites and feces, possibly. It's quite a treasure."
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Rosvold is now left wondering what other treasures are out there, waiting to be discovered.
"I've never tried to date an animal that looks this young before, so it might be that there are even more animals that are that age as well."
The kind of thing you can really only learn when hosting <a href="https://twitter.com/cbcasithappens">@cbcasithappens</a> <a href="https://t.co/xb7yph8mQE">pic.twitter.com/xb7yph8mQE</a>
—@RosieBarton