The bones of the first fossilised breeding colony of albatrosses have been unearthed right here in Bermuda, despite no albatrosses living here or anywhere else in the North Atlantic today.

Scientist Storrs Olson, of the National Museum of History in Washington, DC, in an article published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA, said the birds would probably still be there if they hadn't been driven out by a massive jump in sea level - about 400,000 years ago. And future rises, perhaps due to global warming, could take a similarly heavy toll on other birds and shore dwellers, he warned.

The birds discovered in Bermuda were possibly the last to leave the North Atlantic before sea levels jumped to more than 20 metres above its current height. All of the Bermudian birds were short-tailed albatrosses - a critically endangered species now only found on a few islands off the coast of Japan. Most of the birds were wiped out by feather collectors a century ago.

Elsewhere the albatross, held to be signs of great good luck by superstitious sailors, are under threat from accidental killings by long-line fishing.

The Bermudian colony was entombed under several metres of sand in a single storm, according to the online article, burying adults, eggs and chicks - an event which was fortunate for fossil collectors, as the their taste for wind-swept nesting sites makes them unlikely fossils.

The storm occurred at around the time that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet melted 400,000 years ago, causing a dramatic rise in sea level. This would have flooded all of the good breeding sites on Bermuda, as well as those on many other islands, said the article.

"People have always wondered whether there was a North Atlantic breeding colony, and where they might have been," ecologist Richard Phillips, of the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, is quoted in the article.

The next-youngest North Atlantic albatrosses are about five million years old. It is thought that the joining of North and South America, which cut the Atlantic and Pacific oceans off from one another about three million years ago, may have changed ocean conditions, making it harder for the Atlantic albatrosses to survive.

The fossil species found in the North Atlantic now live in the North Pacific. While it is unclear why they never recolonised the North Atlantic, tropical weather has been suggested to be a barrier.