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On the threshold of flight

10,000 Birds

” We don’t call any rodents “flightless rodents” though almost all of them are. It has evolved in non-vertebrate animals like insects more than once. So for the longest time, the animal life of the earth ate dirt or each other and consisted entirely of creepy crawly things and nothing else.

Rodents 191
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Honey, I Shrunk The Dinosaurs!

10,000 Birds

It is technically correct, and recently fashionable, to insist that any living animal is a member of the larger group that contains it phylogenetically, i.e., ancestrally, with that group often named after the known animal that roots the tree. Meanwhile I have a few random thoughts. Whales are cows. So, for example, humans are apes.

Camels 201
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Questionable Practices at the Calgary Zoo

Critter News

Another animal dies at the Calgary Zoo and more questions are being raised about their practices. The Calgary Zoo is again under scrutiny as details emerged Friday about how a capybara, a species of giant South American rodent, died after becoming caught in a hydraulic door last weekend as it was being moved from one area to another.

Zoos 100
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Are Birds Really Dinosaurs?

10,000 Birds

But that is because we often have the relationship between dinosaurs and birds reversed in our little primate minds; Much of what is bird-like is not exclusive to birds, but rather, to a larger group of dinosaurs. Bipedalism is somewhat rare these days in the animal world.

Birds 271
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Ethiopia’s Endemics

10,000 Birds

They have now evolved to survive mostly on rodents of high elevation moorlands in Ethiopia’s mountains. Gelada lip flare My favorite Ethiopian animal, the Gelada used to be considered a baboon but is actually the last survivor of an ancient group of grass-eating monkeys that used to occur throughout Africa, the Mediterranean and India.

Ethiopia 271
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How much bird is there, anyway?

10,000 Birds

He had the habit of asking very similar question about the animals featured in his zoology lectures, including basic questions like how big they are, what limits physiology puts on their geographic range, etc. For instance, among animals, booby and noddy combined probably represents the majority of the biomass of the somewhat unusual St.

Mammals 177