Birds
New, Bird-Like Dinosaur Solves Evolutionary Puzzle
About a year and a half ago, as my first post on Dinosaur Tracking, I wrote about the discovery of a tiny, termite-eating dinosaur called Albertonykus. It belonged to one of the strangest groups of dinosaurs recognized to date. Called the Alvarezsaurids, these dinosaurs were covered in feathers, ha...
February 01, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
Fossil Feathers May Preserve Dinosaur Colors
At one point or another, almost every general book about dinosaurs I have ever seen has said the same thing: we cannot know what color dinosaurs were. Scientists have found the skin impressions of some specimens, but as far as we know these traces contain nothing that might tell us what color those...
January 28, 2010 |
By Brian Switek
See Scotland from an Eagle's Point of View
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to soar like an eagle? A BBC television show trained a golden eagle to carry two tiny cameras and then sent the bird flying over Scotland. If you could see the world from an animal's point of view, which one would you pick to put cameras on?(Hat tip: Bad...
January 20, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Picture of the Week—An Ostrich
One of the oldest books about animals is the Historia animalium, by the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gesner (1516-1565). It's really a collection of five books, published from 1551 to 1558, that include animals both real and imaginary (e.g., unicorns and sea monsters). The image above is a page from vol...
January 15, 2010 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Were Feathered Dinosaurs Venomous?
Though its dinosaurs looked pretty good, Jurassic Park was not particularly accurate as far as science was concerned. One of the real howlers that sent paleontologists reeling was the decision to make Dilophosaurus, one of the largest of the early predatory dinosaurs, the dinosaur equivalent of a s...
December 22, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Were Dinosaurs Meant to Fly?
One of the most important insights Charles Darwin had was that evolution does not follow a pre-ordained path. There is no evolutionary endpoint that organisms are striving toward. The "endless forms most beautiful" we observe in nature are both shaped by adaption to local conditions and constrained...
December 16, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
The World’s Fastest Animal Takes New York
The peregrine falcon, whose salvation began 40 years ago, commands the skies above the Empire State Building
December 10, 2009 |
By Meera Subramanian
New Dinosaur Helps Fill Out the Early History of "Raptors"
When the big-screen adaptation of Jurassic Park premeired in 1993, "raptors" instantly became some of the most popular dinosaurs. For scientists, though, they posed a troublesome problem. There were only a few types of raptor, technically called dromaeosaurs, known at the time, and paleontologists...
December 09, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Wildlife Trafficking
A reporter follows the lucrative, illicit and heartrending trade in stolen wild animals deep into Ecuador's rain forest
December 2009 |
By Charles Bergman
Is Your Dinosaur Ready For Thanksgiving?
Ah, Thanksgiving, the day when families across the United States sit down for a delicious feast of dinosaur with all the trimmings.You read that correctly. Scientists have recognized that birds and dinosaurs are closely related for over a century, and within the last thirty years a tidal wave of di...
November 25, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Birds That Fish... With Bait
Forget about bomb-sniffing dogs or cats that travel hundreds of miles to get home. If you're looking for signs of intelligent life, no animal (and that includes you, chimpanzees) is as impressive as a bird. Birds can use scent, landmarks, magnetic fields, the location of the sun, the motion of star...
November 25, 2009 |
By Laura Helmuth
Nine Species Saved From Extinction
Last week, the U.S. government took the brown pelican (Pelecanus occidentalis) off the endangered species list. The birds' numbers had been depleted first by feather hunters and then by the pesticide DDT. But the pelicans made a comeback, starting with the 1972 ban on DDT, and now there are more th...
November 17, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Why Roosters Have Wattles
Roosters are funny-looking creatures. They have a red bit that sticks out from the top of their heads—the comb—and another that dangles beneath their chin—the wattle. And then they perform this little dance called "tidbitting" (see first part of video below), in which they make sounds (food calls) ...
November 03, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Bacteria Help a Funny-looking Bird, the Hoopoe
Birds produce special chemicals in their preen gland that they spread over their skin and feathers to protect themselves from pathogens and parasites. The secretions of European hoopoes (Upupa epops) and green woodhoopoes (Phoeniculus purpureus), however, are different from those of other birds. Th...
October 19, 2009 |
By Sarah Zielinski
Darwinopterus, a Transitional Pterosaur
The discovery of new kinds of feathered dinosaurs regularly makes the news these days, but it is important to remember that modern vertebrate paleontology encompasses much more than the search for the origin of birds. Indeed, this week scientists described an equally-spectacular fossil that fills i...
October 15, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Early Bird Archaeopteryx Grew More Like A Dinosaur
Modern birds grow amazingly fast. After hatching, many species grow to adult size in a matter of days to weeks. But a new study published in the journal PLoS One suggests that birds did not always exhibit the same rapid rate of growth. By looking at chips of bone taken from the legs of some of the ...
October 14, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Tiny Cameras Show Albatrosses on the Hunt
Scientists from Britain and Japan used sophisticated techniques to study the feeding behavior of the black-browed albatross (Thalassarche melanophrys) at sea. A lot of useful information came out of this study, but the single item you will likely hear most about is a really cool photograph, taken ...
October 07, 2009 |
By Greg Laden
Return of the Sandpiper
Thanks to the Delaware Bay's horseshoe crabs, the tide may be turning for an imperiled shorebird
October 2009 |
By Abigail Tucker
Tyrannosaurus Suffered From Bird Disease
By now it should not surprise anyone that birds and theropod dinosaurs were closely related. Numerous discoveries have revealed that many "bird" characteristics, like feathers, first evolved in dinosaurs and were passed on to the avian descendants of one group of theropods called coelurosaurs. Tyra...
September 30, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
Feathers Before Archaeopteryx
Ever since the first skeleton of Archaeopteryx was discovered in 1861, the feathered dinosaur has been considered the oldest bird. During the last several decades, however, scientists have found that many "bird" features, such as feathers, first appeared among theropod dinosaurs. What defines a bir...
September 25, 2009 |
By Brian Switek
