#ardenna (a genus of shearwaters)

[new-dinosaurs]

Ardenna buchananbrowni Tennyson et al., 2024 (new species)

(Type specimen of Ardenna buchananbrowni, from Tennyson et al., 2024)

Meaning of name: buchananbrowni = for John Buchanan-Brown [discoverer of one of the two known specimens]

Age: Pliocene (Piacenzian), 3.06–3.36 million years ago

Where found: Tangahoe Formation, Taranaki, New Zealand

How much is known: Partial skeletons of two individuals, together representing most of the skull, much of the forelimb skeleton, and several vertebrae.

Notes: Ardenna is a genus of extant petrels. These seabirds feed on fishes, crustaceans, and cephalopods using a variety of foraging styles, including grabbing prey while swimming on the water's surface and diving underwater to pursue them. Within the genus Ardenna, the short-tailed (A. tenuirostris) and sooty shearwaters (A. grisea) have particular anatomical specializations for diving, such as flattened humeri (upper arm bones).

A. buchananbrowni also exhibits these adaptations in its skeleton, making it the oldest known diving-specialized member of this genus. It was smaller than most extant Ardenna species, and lived alongside a larger extinct species that lacked diving specializations, A. davealleni.

Reference: Tennyson, A.J.D., R.B. Salvador, B.M. Tomotani, and F.G. Marx. 2024. A new diving Pliocene Ardenna shearwater (Aves: Procellariidae) from New Zealand. Taxonomy 4: 237��249. doi: 10.3390/taxonomy4020012

[moved-to-void-kissed]

..The fact that I just spent a solid hour or so scrolling through the entirety of Wikipedia’s list of bird genera to come up with a self-insert name probably isn’t a good sign, is it

(For context, all of the named Celestrians in Dragon Quest IX are named after birds - Aquila meaning eagle, Columba meaning dove, Corvus meaning crow, and so on. This also extends to the names written on various towns’ Guardian statues. Unfortunately I think they’re more specifically named after constellations of birds, like Apus Major - since the bird-of-paradise genus on its own is just Apus - so.. that narrows options down.)

..I’m still thinking about Pavo a lot