Papagaios, Life & Times on a Speculative Archipelago - Marquinhets

Panel text* from the exhibit ‘There’s No Place Like Home – Fossils of Papagaios’ shown in the Natural History Museum of Pacificadora University, March – December 2016.

(*Translation from Portuguese)

If you stood on the cliffs of Milagres in the late Oligocene epoch, 25 million years ago, things would not be too different to today. It would be a little warmer, with average temperatures of around 34°C, and the weather may be a little wetter – if you can believe it!

The animals you saw would seem familiar, if a bit unusual. Seabirds would fly overhead, or dive into the ocean to catch fish, or squawk at you as they dug hollows and small burrows to lay their eggs. These birds are the ancestors of today’s marquinhets.

Explore this room and you’ll see fossils and specimens of the many marquinhet species that have called the Papagaios home…

Side panel:

Marquinhets are found only in the Papagaios Archipelago and are related to the puffins and auks found elsewhere. Their name was given to them by the first Portuguese settlers in the 15th Century.

The settlers were amused by the waddling birds which packed the beaches. The birds’ upright posture, combined with the black feathers and white throat markings reminded the settlers of the robes of priests. The first bishop of the islands at was Father Marcos Gonçalves (1395-1457) and so the birds were nicknamed ‘little Marcos’ or ‘Marquinhos’.

Later, this was changed to ‘marquinhet’ by the 18th Century French scientists who studied Papagaian wildlife and gave them scientific names inspired by the new Linnean system.

While technically speaking, all the endemic seabirds of Papagaios are marquinhets (tribe: Marquinhini), the term is most commonly used to refer to the flightless, waddling birds that can be found on almost every shoreline (Eumarquinidae).

For a long time, it was unknown when exactly marquinhets became flightless with estimates ranging from 15-30 million years ago. It was only in 2002 that a team led by Prof C Novais and Dr C Lucas discovered the remains of Eomarquinhus aquaticus – the oldest confirmed flightless species.

Image of the skull of E. aquaticus, taken from Novais C, Lucas C (2002) Eomarquinhus aquaticus, gen. et sp. nov., a late Oligocene flightless marquinhet. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, 32:78-90, the article which first reported on and named the species.

E. aquaticus is known from a skull, mostly complete spine, ribcage and one wing. From these remains, it can be estimated to have stood at 60cm tall. Comparing the size of the wing to the bird overall, tells us it would have been flightless.

Judging by its beak, and habitat on the western coast of Santuário, E. aquaticus probably hunted fish on and around the Belíssimo Reef as many of its descendants do today.

When reconstructing the appearance of E. aquaticus in life, an amount of guesswork is involved, but we can also look at its living relatives. All marquinhets today are largely black, with some degree of white on their belly, face, and distinctive white markings on the throat. As for the beak, until recently its patterning was up to the artist’s interpretation, but a study that came out only last year analysed fossilised melanosomes and discovered the beak had a large red band, as well as smaller areas of black and white.

The breeding and parental behaviours of E. aquaticus do not fossilise but can be inferred. It likely nested in large colonies on rocky shores where their eggs, camouflaged to look like rocks, could be safely hidden. It is also likely the parents would take shifts guarding the nest while the other hunted as unlike other island groups, the Papagaios have had predators from the start…