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The complete guide to Dodo relatives, living and dead

10,000 Birds

Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. The Dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) — that towering icon of modern anthropogenic extinctions — was a pigeon.

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Here’s the new bird family tree. It’s amazing.

10,000 Birds

It confirms many of the once-radical notions put forward or refined by Shannon Hackett and her colleagues in 2008, and several since, and it proposes solutions to some of the most deeply unresolved questions about how major bird groups are related to each other. ( In 2008, Nick Sly published a review of Hackett et al.

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Combined Beats’ List – September

10,000 Birds

Others, by their own admission, are Luddites and believe that the pinnacle of human technological achievement was reached on the day that man first bound a notebook in moleskin. Common Ostrich – Struthio camelus. Still, the list will be as complete as we can keep it and will be updated on the first Saturday of every month.

2016 154
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Combined Beats’ List – August

10,000 Birds

Others, by their own admission, are Luddites and believe that the pinnacle of human technological achievement was reached on the day that man first bound a notebook in moleskin. Common Ostrich – Struthio camelus. Still, the list will be as complete as we can keep it and will be updated on the first Saturday of every month.

2016 102