The discovery of the remains of a parrot that once flew around in what is now Scandinavia caused much harmless pythonesque fun last week.

Well, there’s nothing new under the sun. Many years ago when the world was young, your favourite weekly science magazine beginning with ‘N’ that isn’t New Scientist published a short note on the remains of a putative fossil parrot from the Cretaceous period (putative, because some people thought that the remain – just the parrot-like schnozz – might have come from a very petite dinosaur, yea, even one that looked like Groucho Marx).

Well, back then it was my task to write Nature’s weekly press release, and just as I was about to sit down and muse about this ex-parrot having died after being shagged out after a long squawk, was pining for the fjords, had shuffled off its mortal coil and gone to join the Choir Invisible, and so on, the figure of the Managing Editor loomed over my desk and counselled me to go easy on the pythonesque allusions, if I knew what was good for me.

So, I admit it, I played it straight.

Well, almost.

Apart from giving it the headline Sketch of Dead Parrot I stuck to the dry essentials of the story, only noting in the final sentence that ‘the beauty of the plumage of this species is not recorded’.