Ananova:

A Monty Python fan has discovered that Norwegian parrots really did exist.

Some 55 million years before John Cleese and Michael Palin immortalised the "Norwegian blue" in the classic dead parrot sketch, parrots were indeed flying around Norway.

But, as the Python pair correctly surmised, they have long been "demised, passed on, ceased to be, stiff, bereft of life".

Dr David Waterhouse found that a fossilised wing recovered from a mine in Denmark came from a bird which belonged to the parrot family, reports the Daily Mirror.

He said: "I specialise in bird fossils and am also a Python fan, so I have lived with jokes about dead parrots for years. Obviously we were dealing with a bird bereft of life, but the tricky bit was establishing it was a parrot."

Dr Waterhouse, 29, assistant curator of natural history at Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service, believes the species would have flown in Norway as it would have had the same climate as Denmark at the time.

He dubbed it the Danish Blue, although the species, a new discovery, has has been given the scientific name Mopsitta Tanta.

It is the first time it has been established parrots ever lived so far north.

But Dr Waterhouse said: "It isn't as unbelievable as you might think. When Mopsitta was alive, most of Northern Europe was experiencing a warm period, with a shallow tropical lagoon covering much of Germany, South East England and Denmark.

"This new evidence suggests that parrots evolved right here in the Northern Hemisphere before diversifying further south in the tropics later on."