Songbirds performed their first arias in Australia more than 50 million years ago, if the interpretation of some tiny scraps of fossilised bone found in the back yard of a farm in Queensland are correct. Australia has long been considered the avian equivalent of an airport lounge, populated by travel-weary stragglers. But these fossils suggest that, far from having a derivative bird fauna, Australia was the place where songbird species first evolved, says Walter Boles of the Australian Museum in Sydney.
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