Oldest seed-eating perching bird discovered

This 7 February 2019 video is called Ancestor to modern day sparrows flew around 52 million years ago.

From the Field Museum in the USA:

Earliest known seed-eating perching bird discovered in Fossil Lake, Wyoming

February 7, 2019

Summary: The ‘perching birds‘, or passerines, are the most common birds in the world today — they include sparrows, robins, and finches. They used to be very rare. Scientists have just discovered some of the earliest relatives of the passerines, including a 52-million-year-old fossil with a thick, curved beak for eating seeds.

Most of the birds you’ve ever seen — sparrows, finches, robins, crows — have one crucial thing in common: they’re all what scientists refer to as perching birds, or “passerines”. The passerines make up about 6,500 of the 10,000 bird species alive today. But while they’re everywhere now, they were once rare, and…