Discover Top Posts Tagged with #neoaves

Rufous treepie on a chital's face, in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Photo by Oleg Rozhko, 2015.

Walbeckornis waltonensis Mayr & Kitchener, 2024 (new species)

(Skull of Walbeckornis waltonensis [scale bars = 5 mm], from Mayr and Kitchener, 2024)

Meaning of name: waltonensis = from Walton-on-the-Naze

Age: Eocene (Ypresian), 54.6‒55 million years ago

Where found: London Clay Formation, Essex, U.K.

How much is known: Partial skeleton of one individual, including a partial skull and many limb bones.

Notes: W. waltonensis exhibits similarities to messelornithids, a group of Paleogene birds closely related to extant rails. The only other species of Walbeckornis that had previously been named was W. creber from the Paleocene of Germany, which is known from numerous specimens but not yet any skull material.

The skull of W. waltonensis is indeed similar in general shape to that of messelornithids. However, some anatomical details suggest that it does not belong to the group uniting all modern gruiform birds (cranes, rails, and their close relatives). The describers of W. waltonensis therefore consider its precise phylogenetic relationships to extant birds unresolved.

Reference: Mayr, G. and A.C. Kitchener. 2024. Messelornithids and messelornithid-like birds from the early Eocene London Clay of Walton-on-the-Naze (Essex, UK). Geobios advance online publication. doi: 10.1016/j.geobios.2023.12.011

#Palaeoblr #Birblr #Dinosaurs #Birds #Walbeckornis waltonensis #Eocene #Europe #Neoaves #2024 #Extinct

So we don't know, exactly, how most birds are related to each other

so, for fun:

vote for a recent neoavian phylogeny hypothesis

Jarvis 2014 (Columbea + Passerea)

Prum 2015 (Strisores (Columbaves (Gruiformes (Aequorlitornithes + Inopinaves))))

Suh 2016 (hard polytomy)

Reddy 2017 (Columba + Different Passerea than Jarvis)

Kuhl 2021 (too complicated for me to fit in the poll)

Braun 2021 (mirandornithes + columbimorphae + polytomy of everything else)

None of these

help I don't know what's going on

I think neoaves is gonna completely fall apart as a clade

Something else entirely I didn't account for

Voting ended onAug 23, 2023

more polls that can't get derailed

had to cut the et al for space, sorry

enjoy

#neoaves #biology #phylogeny #cladistics #evolutionary biology #ornithology #birds #birblr #sciblr #polls #science polls #hypotheses

Day 14- Prehistoric animal from your home country.

I picked the Saint Bathans Heron AKA Mataku otagoense, this was quite challenging to do since I don't really draw birds often and there were barely any resources- I couldn't even find a single reconstruction.

Prompts

Pale chanting goshawk (Melierax canorus)

Photo by Marion Hogl

M. myadestinus taxidermy specimen from the Bishop Museum, Honolulu. Retrieved via Wikimedia Commons. CC0 I usually enjoy returning to old ...

Following up on my 2016 post about Hawaiian solitaires, I wrote up this short blog post tonight to meditate (belatedly) on the USFWS memo from last September which delisted this once endangered, now extinct, bird. More posts are in the pipeline - I promise.