sometimes a poll blog

Brown Thrasher (Toxostoma rufum) family Mimidae, order Passeriformes.

Virginia Wildlife; vol. 32, no. 6. June, 1971. Illustration by John W. Taylor.

A diagram comparing a human hand to the equivalent limb in other mammals from Henry Fairfield Osborn's The age of mammals in Europe, Asia and North America (1910).

Gorgonavis alcyone was an enantiornithean bird that lived in what is now Spain during the early Cretaceous, about 129-126 million years ago.

Enantiornitheans were a diverse and abundant group of Mesozoic birds that retained claws on their wings and often had toothy snouts instead of beaks, and many also had ribbon-like display feathers on their tails instead of lift-generating fans. While they externally looked a lot like modern birds they weren't ancestral to any living forms — instead they represented a separate "cousin" lineage to euornitheans that convergently evolved similar features and lifestyles.

Although known only from an isolated skull, Gorgonavis would probably have been around 14cm long (~5.5") with an estimated wingspan of 30cm (~12"). It seems to have been a close relative of long-snouted enantiornitheans like Longipteryx, having similar elongated jaws with teeth only at the tips. 

If it was a longipterygid it would be the oldest known member of that group and the only one currently known outside of China, suggesting that particular family was much more widespread than previously thought.

Longipterygids were traditionally interpreted as kingfisher-like birds specialized to prey on insects or fish, but two specimens from China with preserved gut contents recently demonstrated that they may actually have been frugivores feeding on the fleshy fruit-like seeds of gymnosperm plants.

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sinosauropteryx update....

For context, my mom is the one who taught me to forage, and it was and is just part of life. She regularly added foraged foods to our everyday meals. I knew how to identify huckleberry before I learned the alphabet. Foraging was just another part of feeding ourselves, along with gardening, raising chickens, and going to the store. And the firmest rule was that you didn't eat a plant unless you were willing to bet your life on it being what you thought it was.

So to watch my coworker see a berry, say 'strawberry!' and then pick it and have it three quarters of the way to his mouth before I could point out that it was actually an unripe blackberry...

Well, it was a striking moment. Because while that particular mix up would not actually hurt you, the lack of paying attention it takes to mistake an unripe blackberry for a strawberry and the lack of caution it takes to put a plant that you've hardly looked at into your mouth- no wonder some people think bittersweet nightshade is a look alike to red huckleberry!

And it explains a lot about how secretive most people are about their foraging spots. If you don't care enough about your own health and well-being to actually look at the plant you're eating, how could I trust you to care for the health and well-being of the plants you want to forage and the ecosystems you want to forage from? I want my foraging spots to be better off for my interactions with them. I want to be able to go back to the same spots year after year and decade after decade and see the native plants thriving, the invasive species losing ground, and the biodiversity increasing.

“I love to spend time at a hyena den. Hyena cubs are beautiful and witnessing the interaction between adults and young are always special.”