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"Birds. Anatomy."
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Birds and their feathers
\"This book tells the story of birds and their feathers for young readers\"--Back cover.
Book
The inner bird : anatomy and evolution
Birds are among the most successful vertebrates on Earth.An important part of our natural environment and deeply embedded in our culture, birds are studied by more professional ornithologists and enjoyed by more amateur enthusiasts than ever before.
eBook
Beaks!
Simple text describes various bird beaks and how birds use them to eat, hunt, and gather food. Includes a quiz.
Book
The earliest bird-line archosaurs and the assembly of the dinosaur body plan
The archosaur species
Teleocrater rhadinus
, part of the new clade Aphanosauria, is an example of the earliest divergence of the avian stem lineage (Avemetatarsalia), the lineage that contains dinosaurs (including birds).
Earliest avian archosaur
The early history of the bird-line archosaurs, a group including dinosaurs, birds and pterosaurs, but excluding crocodilians, is not well defined. This is due in part to a fragmentary fossil record, but the distinctive morphology of pterosaurs has also obscured their ancestry. Sterling Nesbitt and colleagues describe a new species,
Teleocraterrhadinus
, from the Middle Triassic of Tanzania, that represents the most primitive known member of the bird-line archosaurs.
Teleocrater
provides the best guide so far to the ancestral bird-line condition. It was a lightly built, quadrupedal carnivore, so more like a crocodile than the small bipeds often depicted at this point in archosaur evolution. These are long-awaited findings on
Teleocrater
, which was undergoing study by the late Alan Charig of the Natural History Museum in London, and remained unpublished on his death in 1997.
The relationship between dinosaurs and other reptiles is well established
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,
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,
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,
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, but the sequence of acquisition of dinosaurian features has been obscured by the scarcity of fossils with transitional morphologies. The closest extinct relatives of dinosaurs either have highly derived morphologies
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,
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,
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or are known from poorly preserved
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,
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or incomplete material
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,
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. Here we describe one of the stratigraphically lowest and phylogenetically earliest members of the avian stem lineage (Avemetatarsalia),
Teleocrater rhadinus
gen. et sp. nov., from the Middle Triassic epoch. The anatomy of
T. rhadinus
provides key information that unites several enigmatic taxa from across Pangaea into a previously unrecognized clade, Aphanosauria. This clade is the sister taxon of Ornithodira (pterosaurs and birds) and shortens the ghost lineage inferred at the base of Avemetatarsalia. We demonstrate that several anatomical features long thought to characterize Dinosauria and dinosauriforms evolved much earlier, soon after the bird–crocodylian split, and that the earliest avemetatarsalians retained the crocodylian-like ankle morphology and hindlimb proportions of stem archosaurs and early pseudosuchians. Early avemetatarsalians were substantially more species-rich, widely geographically distributed and morphologically diverse than previously recognized. Moreover, several early dinosauromorphs that were previously used as models to understand dinosaur origins may represent specialized forms rather than the ancestral avemetatarsalian morphology.
Journal Article
20 fun facts about bird adaptations
\"When Darwin visited the Galapagos Islands, he found many kinds of finches there, each with a beak perfectly suited to the kind of food the bird commonly ate. The finches had adapted to their surroundings! Wing size, migration patterns, and more are all part of the fascinating bird adaptations included in this book. Readers explore all kinds of birds, bird behavior, and more in an entertaining format and colorful layout. Graphic organizers and full-color photographs complement the main content as readers fly from one fun fact to the next.\"--Publisher's website.
Book
Creation of forest edges has a global impact on forest vertebrates
Forest edges influence more than half of the world’s forests and contribute to worldwide declines in biodiversity and ecosystem functions. However, predicting these declines is challenging in heterogeneous fragmented landscapes. Here we assembled a global dataset on species responses to fragmentation and developed a statistical approach for quantifying edge impacts in heterogeneous landscapes to quantify edge-determined changes in abundance of 1,673 vertebrate species. We show that the abundances of 85% of species are affected, either positively or negatively, by forest edges. Species that live in the centre of the forest (forest core), that were more likely to be listed as threatened by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), reached peak abundances only at sites farther than 200–400 m from sharp high-contrast forest edges. Smaller-bodied amphibians, larger reptiles and medium-sized non-violant mammals experienced a larger reduction in suitable habitat than other forest-core species. Our results highlight the pervasive ability of forest edges to restructure ecological communities on a global scale.
Journal Article
Birds
Explores the remarkable structures and systems that make up the anatomy of a variety of different birds.
Book
An integrative approach to understanding bird origins
Recent discoveries of spectacular dinosaur fossils overwhelmingly support the hypothesis that birds are descended from maniraptoran theropod dinosaurs, and furthermore, demonstrate that distinctive bird characteristics such as feathers, flight, endothermic physiology, unique strategies for reproduction and growth, and a novel pulmonary system originated among Mesozoic terrestrial dinosaurs. The transition from ground-living to flight-capable theropod dinosaurs now probably represents one of the best-documented major evolutionary transitions in life history. Recent studies in developmental biology and other disciplines provide additional insights into how bird characteristics originated and evolved. The iconic features of extant birds for the most part evolved in a gradual and stepwise fashion throughout archosaur evolution. However, new data also highlight occasional bursts of morphological novelty at certain stages particularly close to the origin of birds and an unavoidable complex, mosaic evolutionary distribution of major bird characteristics on the theropod tree. Research into bird origins provides a premier example of how paleontological and neontological data can interact to reveal the complexity of major innovations, to answer key evolutionary questions, and to lead to new research directions. A better understanding of bird origins requires multifaceted and integrative approaches, yet fossils necessarily provide the final test of any evolutionary model. Research on the origin and evolution of birds has gathered pace in recent years, aided by a continuous stream of new fossil finds as well as molecular phylogenies. Bird origins, in particular, are now better understood than those of mammals, for which the early fossil record is relatively poor compared with that of birds. Xu et al. review progress in tracing the origins of birds from theropod dinosaurs, focusing especially on recent fossil finds of feathered dinosaurs of northeastern China. They integrate current research on developmental biology and functional anatomy with the paleontological record, to show how key features of birds—feathers, wings, and flight—originated and evolved, and radiated from their dinosaur forebears. Science , this issue 10.1126/science.1253293
Journal Article
Birds from head to tail
This book introduces beginning readers to some of the similarities and differences of our feathered friends, showing them that although birds share many standard features, each kind is also wonderfully unique.
Book
Ecological drivers of global gradients in avian dispersal inferred from wing morphology
An organism’s ability to disperse influences many fundamental processes, from speciation and geographical range expansion to community assembly. However, the patterns and underlying drivers of variation in dispersal across species remain unclear, partly because standardised estimates of dispersal ability are rarely available. Here we present a global dataset of avian hand-wing index (HWI), an estimate of wing shape widely adopted as a proxy for dispersal ability in birds. We show that HWI is correlated with geography and ecology across 10,338 (>99%) species, increasing at higher latitudes and with migration, and decreasing with territoriality. After controlling for these effects, the strongest predictor of HWI is temperature variability (seasonality), with secondary effects of diet and habitat type. Finally, we also show that HWI is a strong predictor of geographical range size. Our analyses reveal a prominent latitudinal gradient in HWI shaped by a combination of environmental and behavioural factors, and also provide a global index of avian dispersal ability for use in community ecology, macroecology, and macroevolution.
In birds, the hand-wing index is a morphological trait that can be used as a proxy for flight efficiency. Here the authors examine variation of hand-wing index in over 10,000 bird species, finding that it is higher in migratory and non-territorial species, and lower in the tropics.
Journal Article