10,000 Birds
JUNE 8, 2011
If studying insects would lead you to suppose that God had an “an inordinate fondness for beetles&# , studying the pre-human avifauna of the Pacific would lead you to conclude that God was also quite partial to rails. How many species there were is probably lost to history, but there were certainly many hundreds.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 7, 2014
In fact, the Dodo belonged to a clade (sometimes called Raphini) of 15 remarkable, bizarre, intriguing island-adapted pigeons, some of which are still alive today, but eight of which have been hacked from the tree of life, driven to extinction by humans. The painting above is by 17th-century Flemish artist Roelant Savery.
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