#fossil pigeons

[vueblogs]

Top 24 Smartest Pet Birds in the World-Parrot to Pigeon

Top 24 Smartest Pet Birds in the World-Parrot to Pigeon

Hello friends, if you are a pet birds lover, then the article for you. In this article I will introduces top 24 smartest pet birds in the world from parrots to pigeons. It then ranks them from least intelligent to most intelligent. I will talks about a wide variety of birds in general but focuses mainly on parrots scientific name and history because they are one of the smartest birds. Parrots…

[cypherdecypher]

Animal of the Day!

Dodo (Raphus cucullatus)

(Photo from Smithsonian Magazine)

Extinction Date- 1681

Habitat- Island of Mauritius

Size (Weight/Length)- 22 kg; 90 cm tall

Diet- Fruits; Nuts; Roots; Seeds

Cool Facts- As dodos went extinct in the 1600’s, we only know what they look like from incomplete skeletons and illustrations. These large birds were found only on the tiny Island of Mauritius off the coast of Madagascar. Little is known about their behavior but their skeletons imply they could run extremely fast despite being unable to fly. Their large beak may have been used in territorial displays due to the Island’s limited resources. They were primarily vegetarians but would occasionally eat a crab or shellfish. People first visited the Island of Mauritius in 1507 and the dodos were quickly hunted by people and invasive species alike due to their flightless and fearless behavior. Today, the near threatened Nicobar pigeon is their closest relative. Cracking down on the illegal pet trade and their illegal poaching has resulted in the Nicobar pigeon doing much better than their long since passed relative.

Rating- 13/10 (Dodos were originally thought to be a myth and extinction to be propaganda.)

[samimarkart]

doodled more sticker designs last night to take my mind off the storm that was going on outside :)

[bwabbitv3s]

The Birds I Never Met | North America's Extinct Birds

Recently I looked into a number of extinct birds from all around the world, but few of them shed light on those that I would've lived alongside. Today we're "borrowing" my mom's field guide on the Birds of Eastern and Central North America to learn about those birds that I might've witnessed had I been alive only a century ago!

[crave-mp3]

hiiii vic how r you <- being tormented by mr kurtis conners dyke potential

hi im alright but now im very intrigued. tell me about kurtis conners dyke potential (<- has a very very vague image of his face akin to a mirage and thats it)

[reginaldubel]

idk if I asked you yet but favorite prehistoric animal?

AHEM

so for dinosaurs tyrannosaurus rex was always the favorite dinosaur ever even when i was a child and still is . it just looks awesome i dont mean its cus it was a powerful predator (that too) but it just looks so cute. its face makes me think of a dog kind of but i just love them <3 then other favorite dinosaurs are pachyrhinosaurus, specifically lakustai cause of the horns on its frill (walking with dinosaurs 3D/the movie made me love them more *atleast the version with no talking*), carnotaurus cus their little horns are so unique but theyre also absolutely SOSIG, may i say baryonyx too. i dont know why it just is

other prehistoric animals i may wanna mention (counts as a dinosaur too anyways) are dodos..... i remember reading a shitton of articles about them..... it kinda breaks my heart they got hunted to extinction. anyways, most most favorite one is also mammoth (because i already love elephants theyre my favorite animals) because IF YOU ALREADY LOVE ELEPHANTS WHY WOULD YOU NOT LOVE. THE FLUFFY ONES. then honorable mention to dimetrodons because they look funky. and also fool you because they ''look like dinosaurs'' to most people but theyre not

i may be forgetting some if not alot but those are the ones i can name on the top of my head...

[writers-potion]

Magic In The Future Ideas

Universities have departments of magic, offering degrees in subjects such as magical anthropology, magical energy studies, comparative magic and magical theology.

Research magicians apply for grants from the government.

MRI scans detect what results from magic activity has on the brain

Some psychotherapists specialize in treating magic-traumatized victims

A large part of each nation's military budget goes towards magical weapons and defenses.

In some areas, magic is so frequent that the concentration of magical energies leads to problems: pets display disturbed behavior, wildlife fail to reproduce, and homing pigeons lose their way.

Instead of finding witchcraft cool, teenagers moan about having to study magic in school.

Software and apps enable ordinary people to use magic on their computers.

In some countries, denying the existence of magic is a punishable offense.

In totalitarian states, all magic is controlled by the government. Anyone found practicing magic without permission gets imprisoned.

Unprotected exposure to large doses of magic is harmful.

Magicians seek publication in peer-reviewed journals.

Environmentalists advocate the use of magic instead of fossil fuel.

Large-scale studies compare the effectiveness of different spells and magic systems on different people, complete with control groups and placebos.

Hospitals employ healing magicians the same way they employ surgeons and scrub nurses.

Teams of mages compete in televised contests.

After decades of unrestricted magic use, humans become aware that magic harms the environment. By that time, Earth suffers the consequences of heavy magic pollution.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* . ───

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[pangur-and-grim]

memento mori

2. relics, but with extinct animals in place of saints

3. memorial portraits

4. pre-historical children's drawings

5. scientifically inaccurate bestiary art

6. close-ups from the Tapestry of Flowers and Animals

7. fossilized soft tissue

8. bad taxidermy

9. Ukiyo-e cats

10. cave drawings

[new-dinosaurs]

Pterodroma zinorum Rando et al., 2024 (new species)

(Skull of Pterodroma zinorum, from Rando et al., 2024)

Meaning of name: zinorum = for Paul Alexander Zino and Francis Zino [Portuguese ornithologists]

Suggested common name: Azorean little gadfly petrel

Age: Holocene (Meghalayan)

Where found: The Azores archipelago (at least on Graciosa, São Jorge, Pico, Terceira, and São Miguel)

How much is known: At least three partial skeletons including nearly complete skulls and multiple limb bones. Hundreds of isolated bones (mainly limb bones and some skull fragments) are also known, though it is unclear how many individuals are represented by these.

Notes: Pterodroma is the genus of gadfly petrels, a group of small- to medium-sized seabirds known for their fast, erratic flight. They are found across the world's oceans, but are most diverse in the Atlantic Basin. Their diet consists mainly of soft-bodied prey such as squid that they capture near the ocean's surface, and they only visit land to breed on islands.

Currently, three species of Pterodroma breed in two of the Macaronesian archipelagos in the North Atlantic, but a new study on their fossil record shows that the genus was once more widespread across Macaronesia in historical times and included at least one now-extinct species, the newly-named P. zinorum.

P. zinorum was slightly smaller than the average city pigeon and smaller than most other Atlantic Pterodroma species, being around the same size as Zino's petrel (P. madeira), which breeds on the island of Madeira in Macaronesia today. Compared to P. madeira, P. zinorum had slightly shorter wings and feet, as well as a taller and more curved tip of the beak. Radiocarbon dating of its bones indicate that P. zinorum survived to at least sometime within the 12th–17th Centuries. The exact cause of its extinction is unknown, but was likely human-driven given the recent timing and the fact that petrels are often vulnerable to disturbance of their nesting sites by humans and introduced predators.

Reference: Rando, J.C., H. Pieper, F. Pereira, E. Torres-Roig, and J.A. Alcover. 2024. Petrel extinction in Macaronesia (North-East Atlantic Ocean): the case of the genus Pterodroma (Aves: Procellariiformes: Procellariidae). Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 202: zlae123. doi: 10.1093/zoolinnean/zlae123

[originalleftist]

This is the first dinosaur we should clone.

(Birds are, of course, theropod dinosaurs, and while DNA deteriorates too much after tens of millions of years for us to be able to clone non-avian dinosaurs, there are actually a whole lot of magnificent extinct birds we could bring back. The Passenger pigeon and the Dodo are probably the most famous, but we could also reintroduce giant flightless plant-eating birds (Moas) and giant flightless predatory birds (Terror Birds), among others.)

On this day in 1914, Martha, the last-known living Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) died at the Cincinnati Zoo. Her death at age 29 after a lifetime in captivity marked the disappearance of her once-abundant species from the world. And it made her name synonymous with species extinction at human hands. But what happened?

Before the second half of the nineteenth century, the Passenger Pigeon was the most common bird in the United States, with a population numbering in the billions. Flocks of pigeons flying overhead were so dense that they could darken the skies. But a combination of overhunting and habitat destruction sent this species into decline, and by the turn of the century, it was considered extinct in the wild.

Photo: Enno Meyer, CC0 1.0, Wikimedia Commons

[bomberqueen17]

just when i thought i was gonna get outta this alive

I was disconsolately pecking at my attempts to do literally anything else with my life except be hyperfixated on this fic

and then i was like heh heh what if i filed the serial numbers off and put them in space

you know, like you do. but then i was like no, in space you lose the massive manpower requirements of all this; there's automated systems, there's computers, there's all this automated stuff. and i don't want to try to warp these character dynamics around to use that. i don't want them typing into screens or programming things. the aesthetics are all wrong. and i've written attempts at space things before and i don't like how cold space is and it's just. i mean i don't hate it, and there could be planetside stuff maybe, but i just.

idk i was chewing on it and gave up to go do something else and then was struck with great force as if from a great height with the memory that the Thing i Was Working On last time i tried to do really original fic was this whole solarpunk universe

I mean there were mammoths in it, which was what I was most excited about, but also post-industrial technology. no fossil fuels but all kinds of solar, wind, water power, and the main overarching plot thing I was working on was that there had been a solar flare that had taken down radio communications, and this was a periodic thing so civilization was used to working around periodic outages-- I did all this research into homing pigeons etc-- but part of what was hanging me up on the story was, I think, a problem that I'd made this huge setting and this potentially massive complicated societal whatsit and then I was having just two people work on the World-Altering Problem and it was too cozy.

so i actually did a side story with other characters set in that world to kind of further explore where that could go, and never really got anywhere with it but had Just So Goddamn Much Aesthetic stuff, really I did

anyway

what if several of the societies in this world have reinvented tall ships and have elaborate systems of merchant marines and navies

it's a post-industrial-collapse kind of setting with many reasons that large-scale industry hasn't returned, but they could manage tall ships, with some modern conveniences, but they'd still have at their core fairly old-school technologies. and it could be such a good plot to have them used to dealing with brief radio outages but then be hit by a massive one that isn't resolving. like, alongside my original plot.

anyway.

now i'm reimagining this but solarpunk, hold onto your hats.

i mean i'm gonna keep going on the OG for a little while too don't worry because I just got to a good part but

that's what I'm considering.

[mindblowingscience]

Evolutionary biologists at Johns Hopkins Medicine report they have combined PET scans of modern pigeons along with studies of dinosaur fossils to help answer an enduring question in biology: How did the brains of birds evolve to enable them to fly? The answer, they say, appears to be an adaptive increase in the size of the cerebellum in some fossil vertebrates. The cerebellum is a brain region responsible for movement and motor control. The research findings are published in the Jan. 31 issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Continue Reading.

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Fossil Novembirb 9: Getting a Grip

Zygodactylus by @thewoodparable

Today, half of all birds - so half of all living dinosaurs - are in a clade called Passeriformes, aka "Perching Birds". Of course, not all birds that perch are in this clade, but what can you do. With three toes forward and one long toe facing back, these animals can easily perch upright on branches and have tendons in their legs to help stiffen their grip while sleeping, enabling them to stay put!

But where did this giant group get started?

Australaves phylogenetic tree from Wikipedia

For a while, the prevalent idea was that they evolved from similar birds that perch in trees, such as pigeons and swifts. However, genetic evidence showed that the closest relatives of passerines were actually... parrots! And their closest relatives are Falcons, and just outside of that, Seriemas! What a wild twist!

Of course, paleontologists - being paleontologists - wanted to find the fossil evidence of this evolution. Luckily, as the genetic picture became clear, so did the fossil one - a handful of fossil birds that were mysteries before suddenly became clear, and more and more are being found as time goes on.

Primozygodactylus by @quetzalpali-art

In the Early Eocene, many of these early Passerine-Parrot relatives existed, and showcase a fascinating stepwise evolution of Passerine characteristics - namely, the feet. While the smaller head and size of Passerines evolved first, and show up in early relatives such as Zygodactylus, the foot arangement? Not so much. Instead, these animals had the bodies of passerines, and the feet of parrots! This indicates that the skinny legs and specialized wing shape of Passerines evolved first, and the special feet second. Truly, this and the many other stem-passerines we have found with this configuration qualify as "Evolutionary Missing Links". Dinosaurs remain our best way to show how evolution has happened over time! But I digress.

Eofringillirostrum by @otussketching

From these animals eventually came Passerines, though they were not especially common to begin with - many other birds lived in trees too, such as Mousebirds, and like all great dynasties, Passerines needed time to get started. That doesn't mean they weren't around - Eofringillirostrum, one of the smallest fossil dinosaurs we have, was already living kind of like a modern finch, without being closely related to them!

What's weird, however, is that most of our earliest known passerine and stem-passerine fossils are from North America and Europe. This is, however, a sampling bias - we just have spent more time looking for fossils in these locations. The "most basal" (ie, earliest-branching) passerines and parrots are both found in Aotearoa today - indicating that this clade probably diverged and first appeared somewhere in Oceania. Hopefully, fossils of these early Passerine-Parrots will be found in the region soon!

Wieslochia by @drawingwithdinosaurs

Alas, Passerine fossils of any kind do not become particularly common until the early Miocene, indicating that the climate change occurring globally at the time did allow Passerines to diversify more than they had previously. Perhaps Passerines were more adaptable to colder and drier climates than other tree birds had been, or their specialized perching feet allowed them to live easier in different types of forests. By the late Miocene, modern genera were even appearing. Though these delicately boned dinosaurs do not fossilize easily, more and more of the puzzle is showcasing how we got to the point where half of all living dinosaurs belong to this group.

In fact, thanks to genomics, we have something of an idea as to why Passerines speciate at the drop of a hat - and that reason is recombination! For some reason, Passeriformes are more prone to genomic restructuring and shuffling, with even short periods of separation between populations leading to rapid accumulation of these genomic architectural differences. Between that and the variety of ecologies such small arboreal animals can inhabit, it was just a perfect set of conditions for so many species to evolve - and honestly? I doubt Passeriformes are going anywhere any time soon.

Sources:

Conway, M., B. J. Olsen. 2019. Contrasting drivers of diversification rates on islands and continents across three passerine families. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 286(1915): 20191757.

Gibb, G. C., R. England, G. Hartig, P. A. McLenachan, B. L. Taylor Smith, B. J. McComish, A. Cooper, D. Penny. 2015. New Zealand Passerines Help Clarify the Diversification of Major Songbird Lineages during the Oligocene. Genome Biology and Evolution 7(11): 2983-2995.

Manthey, J. D., J. Klicka, G. M. Spellman. 2021. The Genomic Signature of Allopatric Speciation in a Songbird is Shaped by Genome Architecture (Aves: Certhia americana). Genome Biology and Evolution 13(8): evab120.

Mayr, G., A. C. Kitchener. 2022. Psittacopedids and zygodactylids: the diverse and species-rich Psittacopasserine birds from the early Eocen London Clay of Walton-on-the-Naze (Essex, UK). Historical Biology 35 (12): 2372-2395.

Mayr, 2022. Paleogene Fossil Birds, 2nd Edition. Springer Cham.

Mayr, 2017. Avian Evolution: The Fossil Record of Birds and its Paleobiological Significance (TOPA Topics in Paleobiology). Wiley Blackwell.

Mayr, G. and A. Manegold. 2006. New specimens of the earliest European passeriform bird. Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 51(2):315-323.

[yatima]

Ok Tumblr it's your Elder here to remind you that yes, the Northern Hemisphere nights are dark and the cold is getting into your bones and maybe you think everything's going to keep getting worse forever and you'll just get older and older until everyone and everything you love is dead: but you're only partly right.

Because yes sure we are all gonna die but in the meantime and maybe even because of that, there's joy. Even if it's only a bird half glimpsed from a moving vehicle, even if it's only the warmth in a cup of coffee, even if it's only the memory of someone who adored you as whole-chestedly and unconditionally as you deserve to be adored, joy is real in the world.

And tomorrow morning as I write this, the sun will shine along the passage at Newgrange and the sun daggers will frame the petroglyph in Chaco Canyon, and that is evidence that the long slow celestial mechanics of reversion to the mean will pull us inexorably back to springtime and the first green things growing out of the earth. The elders before me built these monuments to remind me to remind you that the sun will return.

And in the meantime let's hold hands in the dark. Let's tell the bleakest jokes we can think of at funerals to try and get the bereaved to laugh. Let's hug each other to coregulate our tender nervous systems that are trying so hard to keep us safe and alive. Let's watch how fast the efficiency of solar power is overtaking that of fossil fuels (effectively free energy by 2035: let's live to see it.) Let's revel in gods like pigeons and coyotes that can learn to coexist with humans.

Let's remember that there are more ordinary people of goodwill than we can possibly imagine: people who observe stop signs and pull over to let fire engines pass and who pay their fucking taxes and never cross pocket lines: normal working people who are kind to animals and who love all children and who feel solidarity across race and class and gender lines. Let's be those people and raise our children of blood and choice to be those people, the infrastructure of the world, the sunbeams shining into the dark.

[finleyforevermore]

A collection of out of context quotes from Off-Book: The Improvised Musical Podcast because it is criminally underrated and more people need to know about it:

"Relax, you're at the lake-[WHEEZE]"

"My name's not Vanessa, it's Li'l Fossil!"

"Who do I gotta eat to be king of this town?"

"I'm an empath, but I'm not good at it."

"It's hard to be married to a guy that everyone respects."

"I'm going to smoke several packs of cigarettes!"

"Congratulations, you successfully stole that baby!"

"Everyone get your sweaters off."

"I was about to be inwardly sad, but outwardly brave."

"What do you mean "he's fine"? He's dead!"

"She's as stupid as that Sally Fields!"

"We're all gonna die soon."

"Buy a stupid little sack for your baby!"

"When you're looking at a microwave, that's not a microwave, it's basically dirt!"

"It's you!....say what you are!"

"When you were born, you came tumbling out."

"You can't just call upon a Ratatouille, like, a Ratatouille has to happen to you, you know?"

"Which war was it?"

"Tombathy, if I wanted a silver gear, I would have been born a poor person!"

"I don't know you anymore. I'm famous now."

"I gotta take a sip of liquid death-"

"But honestly, you know what might solve that?: patricide."

"How does a hot chocolate man have his own camera?"

"You can't stop the war that's about to begin!"

"My best friend is a 6 foot tall mouse!"

"I haven't heard you call me 'treasure' since 1992." "Yeah, that's probably when you started calling me John."

"Julia Roberts knows how to not upstage."

"Yeah, fuck you pigeon, I don't like you at all."

"Which came first? My dreams or these eggs?"

"No, it's because my father broke everything that started with K in the house one Christmas."

"No one's ever seen your face except for your wife? How did you grow up?" [....QUEUE SONG]

"I now pronunce this high school...dead."

"Stop that baby! She's headed to the stairs!"

"You wanna know the story with Santa and his marriage?"

[mikkeneko]

okay but this is exactly the sort of thing I mean when I think about "the Eden fallacy" in environmentalism and how destructive it is as a line of thinking

I don't want to deny the importance of being able to grieve for things lost or subscribe to "but the environment has changed before!" crap, but. this business of assigning a moral weight to the environment being a certain way is... it doesn't lead good places, ok? why does it matter what the biome looked like "when Rome was doing that whole conquer the med thing?" why is that, in particular, something we feel like we have to aspire to?

ten thousand years ago the northern hemisphere was covered in glaciers, and megafauna the world has never seen since abounded. now it's not. ten million years ago the globe was ten degrees hotter and the oxygen content was higher and life forms flourished then that are now found nowhere but fossils. those worlds are gone now. should someone be punished for that? were those environments morally better than the one we had five hundred years ago? fifty years ago? now? are great forests superior to deserts? are charismatic megafauna more valuable than pigeons or crayfish? why?

we need to be able to find beauty and value in the world we have around us right now, or what's the point in trying to preserve it? if everything is Corrupt and Lesser and good things are Lost Forever then why try to save them?

there's a species of butterfly that lives exclusively in the sand dunes at the end of the runway off the LAX airport. It is because the airport and flyover zone is there that the dunes can stand undisturbed, that the buckwheat can grow, and the butterflies can flourish. biodiversity grows, uncelebrated, in every abandoned lot. we have to be able to love a world where this is true.