Australian parrots and their adaptation to habitat change

cartographer Mercator made a world map that included a place, somewhere near present-day Australia, that he named Terra Psittacorum – the Land of Parrots – and the first European settlers in Australia often referred to the country as Parrot Land. In 1865, the celebrated British naturalist and wildlife artist John Gould said: “No group of birds gives Australia so tropical and benign an air as the numerous species of this great family by which it is tenanted. C Parrots are descendants of an ancient line. Due to their great diversity, and since most species inhabit Africa, Australia and South America, it seems almost certain that parrots originated millions of years ago on the ancient southern continent of Gondwana, before it broke up into the separate southern hemisphere continents we know today. Much of Gondwana comprised vast rainforests intersected by huge slow-flowing rivers and expansive lakes, but by eight million years ago, great changes were underway. The center of the continent of Australia had begun to dry out, and the rainforests that once covered it gradually contracted to the continental margins, where, to a limited extent, they still exist today.