The young owl is a newly described species named Masillastrix blattophaga. Researchers unearthed the almost perfectly preserved bird in 2025 in the Messel Pit, an ancient lake surrounded by a forest that is now the richest fossil site in the world for understanding life in the Eocene epoch (56 million to 34 million years ago). The skull is missing, but the rest of the fossil was so well preserved that researchers found the owl's last meal in its stomach: a greenish-blue, iridescent cockroach.
This indicates that owls were not nocturnal 47 million years ago and so must have switched to the night-owl lifestyle more recently, said study first author Gerald Mayr, a paleontologist and head of ornithology at the Senckenberg Research Institute and the Natural History Museum Frankfurt in Germany.
Therefore, it is plausible that the Messel owl was fully diurnal, rather than active during the daytime and nighttime as some owls are today, because that would imply that some of its ancestors had already evolved nocturnal traits, Mayr said.
It's possible that the owl ate the cockroach at dawn or at dusk, which might cast doubt on whether the bird was diurnal. But there are other clues hinting that the owl was diurnal, including the appearance of some of the owl's feathers and the stoutness of its upper wing bones.
The fossil was so well preserved that researchers identified a cockroach in the stomach that was likely the owl's last meal. (Image credit: Mayr et al. 2026. (CC BY 4.0))
Assuming this hypothesis is correct, the earliest known nocturnal owl species are from about 35 million years ago, in the Late Eocene, Mayr said. Owl fossils from this period and more recently look a lot like modern owls and have elongated humeri, he noted. The oldest known owl in the fossil record, Ogygoptynx wetmorei, dates to around 60 million years ago.
"We still know so little about the early evolution of modern birds," Mayr said, adding that every fossil discovery has the power to change even well-established ideas in the field.
RELATED STORIESThe big question that remains is why owls became nocturnal. Previous theories suggested that owls evolved this behavior to avoid competition with diurnal birds of prey or to benefit from a proliferation of nocturnal mammals. But studies show that both of these groups exploded much later than 35 million years ago — around 20 million to 25 million years ago — suggesting there wasn't a clear advantage driving owls to switch to nocturnal lifestyles at that time.
The new results have deepened the uncertainty of why owls turned nocturnal. But "by narrowing down the time frame when owls became nocturnal, our study may eventually contribute to solving this mystery," Mayr said.
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