ANGRY BALL OF FLUFF

I am a truly cursed human being with cursed hands who draws cursed things. 

I present to you reverse horrible harpies. 

Continuing my streak of making quizzes that are more like weird experiences than actual quizzes with a New Creation!  

Jonathan Case, writer of the Distillatoria and Circus Friends graphic novels, drew a series of Garden Wall pieces for Inktober. Here’s objectively his best one, a blessed icon of the holy and supreme Saint Beatrice.

https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/5/eaat0787

the paper is OUT and y’all seriously this is the coolest  shit i have ever seen; three whole years later and i am STILL incredibly psyched to learn that hoatzins are even more of a missing link than everybody always thought

wing claws? been done. hell, other birds even have horns! what else you got

obligate herbivory? that’s fairly unique yeah, but birds eat other plant parts so

enlarged crop that acts as a fermentation chamber for leafs? pretty cool, sure 

fully independent quadrupedal motion??? now THAT’S sexy and unexpected

like we all make jokes about birds are dinosaurs and all but hoatzin genuinely are living fossils; every attempt to link them to extant clades ends with “the hoatzin family (opisthocomus) branched off from [clade] 64 million years ago” which is scientist talk for “this is our best guess from the data we have right here but hooboy opisthocomus is WAY out there.”

this video shows us how birds might have moved before they invented flapping