I finally got my copy, Beebe’s copy, of his book Our Search for a Wilderness, with his bookplate. The seller thought it was an iguana, but I knew it was a sketch of a possible “pre-Archaeopteryx” avian ancestor he had imagined. In 1910. I think it was 2003 when they dug up Microraptor gui. The …
Tag: Birds
#feathersdammit#FEATHERS
Pluvi Tweets about this fantastic photo of Cassowaries, and once again damns the lizards of Jurassic Park. Early adapters can risk looking weird, but those who cling to the old paradigm too long can come to look like Flat – Earthers…
Paradigm Shift!
It’s happening NOW. Tim Gallagher just sent me this image from a comics website: feathered tyrannosaurid attacking Roman legionnaires!
Convergence
No one has ever explained this close evolutionary convergence to me; even Jonathan Kingdon thought they looked less alike than they do. Nearctic Meadow “lark”: an icterid ((New Word blackbird), common here and a lovely singer; and African Longclaw, also a bird of savannahs. But HOW? I am sure we will someday figure it out, …
Another Image: Crook
I dug this up recently for a gun scholar and to refresh my memory. General Crook, famed in the Indian wars in the southwest, and a fair man, was also an amateur but serious ornithologist, and poses here with a “lifter” Parker, so combining at LEAST three blog themes.
Links, Big Birds, and all the news that fits…
When you have been dealing with meds and other unavoidable and annoying facts of aging, everything piles up. You don’t think Lucas Machias or Lane B stops mailing or that Annie D doesn’t send me a mix of the surreal and the biological, or JP stops writing his serious essays, do you? The world goes …
Dream Birds
The Green Junglefowl and the Nicobar pigeon resemble chickens and pigeons but pushed to fever- dream intensity. The mere existence of such creatures is at least a partial antidote to the blues. Photos taken in Indonesia by Federico Calboli
“…all Dinosaurs had feathers”
The report (HT John Wilson) begins: “The first ever example of a plant-eating dinosaur with feathers and scales has been discovered in Russia. Previously only flesh-eating dinosaurs were known to have had feathers so this new find indicates that all dinosaurs could have been feathered.” The big thing here is the “all” I have been …
We Need More Feathered Dinos
John McLoughlin was writing about them in the late SEVENTIES. Isn’t it time yet to acknowlege, preferably before the next Jurassic Park, that dinos resemble eagles and turkeys and Roadrunners more than, oh, fence lizards? Especially with all the good artists around… These last would be so good if they weren’t lizard- naked! This guy …
Floyd Robbins
Reader and commenter Gil Tracy introduced me to the work of his friend, the wood carver Floyd Robbins of South Carolina. I didn’t think carving was art until I saw these. You have seen the “dead dove” below; take a look at these extraordinary objects. Gil says: “The wisp of snipe has to be seen …