But get this: Benson goes on to explain that one of the “bizarre” features of Oculudentavis is qualities present in lizards but neither in birds nor in dinosaurs. It is smaller than most hummingbirds but had over a hundred teeth… The more research we do, one suspects, the more of this type of thing we’ll find and the harder it would all be to explain to our old Darwinian schoolteacher.
Tag: birds
Michael Egnor: The bird does NOT do math
Egnor: Dr. Pepperberg could have been more forthright: Parrots can’t do statistics. No animal (except man) can do statistics, because statistical reasoning is abstract and only human beings are capable of abstract thought. Parrots think concretely—they think of particular things and relations between particular things, but they cannot think without particular things—they can’t think abstractly.
Coffee!: All the wildlife that use a fallen log bridge
Maybe you didn’t even know they were out there but the hidden camera catches them.
Even bird droppings can confute science expectations
Apparently, bird droppings are not corrosive or hard to remove because of uric acid because there is little uric acid in them. As the wag once said, it’s not what we know that’s the problem; it’s what we know that ain’t so.
Birds must choose between big brains and big guts
This is further indirect evidence— not, of course, drawn out here—that the human brain did not develop the way it did simply to enable survival.
Researchers: 50 million years needed to recover extinct NZ birds! No, alas,, it’s impossible
Apart from cloning, to get the exact same birds, we’d have to rent the multiverse (if it existed). And then we would have an infinite number of planets with islands like New Zealand, including these birds. Never mind one…
Researchers: When mates are rare, birds help their parents raise more offspring
Male birds are more likely to do so: After a five-year experiment, researchers from Florida State University and the Tallahassee-based Tall Timbers Research Station found that when fewer mates were available for brown-headed nuthatches, these small pine-forest birds opted to stay home and help their parents or other adults raise their offspring… Associate Professor of Read More…
Birds are found to plan like humans for their offsprings’ future
Popscience: No natural mechanism is remotely suggested, so we must assume that it is sheer mental power, of the sort that we species-ists once thought existed only in humans, that enables the hen bird to plan for her chicks’ future. Shame on us!
Darwinian cheating story about birds not confirmed
The strategy is not outstandingly successful and the researchers are now looking for an explanation other than a selective advantage. That’s wise on their part. This sounds like another strategy where the bird merely adapts; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. No big Darwin theory is needed.
Darwinism challenged as explanation for finch beaks
Researchers: The observation that Galapagos finch species possessed different beak shapes to obtain different foods was central to the theory of evolution by natural selection, and it has been assumed that this form-function relationship holds true across all species of bird. (But they found it wasn’t consistent.)
Bird, tested and released, turned out to be a hybrid of three species
From ScienceDaily: Scientists have shown that a bird found in Pennsylvania is the offspring of a hybrid warbler mother and a warbler father from an entirely different genus — a combination never recorded before now and which resulted in a three-species hybrid bird. This finding has just been published in the journal Biology Letters. “It’s Read More…
Mystery: Extinct birds as well adapted for flight as surviving modern ones
But they aren’t the ancestors of the modern ones. They died out, but why? From ScienceDaily: “We know that birds in the early Cretaceous, about 115 to 130 million years ago, were capable of flight but probably not as well adapted for it as modern birds,” said Atterholt, who is now an assistant professor and Read More…
Why birds mimic well: Contradicts earlier claims
Further to how cats get the rodents they will eat to lose their fear of them, we are now beginning to understand how parrots become excellent voice imitators. From Duke University, An international team of scientists led by Duke University researchers has uncovered key structural differences in the brains of parrots that may explain the Read More…