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birds

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... Read More ›

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 Biological Science Emily DuVal and Jim Cox, a vertebrate ecologist from Tall Timbers and a courtesy faculty member at FSU, had long been interested in how these tiny birds showed cooperation—that is often having non-breeding young adults hang out and help raise chicks. After all, bypassing the chance to reproduce is not typically how nature works… This was the first large-scale, experimental evidence that the 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! Read More ›

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. Read More ›

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.) Read More ›

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 extremely rare,” explains lead author and Cornell Lab of Ornithology postdoctoral associate David Toews. “The female is a Golden-winged/Blue-winged Warbler hybrid — also called a Brewster’s Warbler. She then mated with a Chestnut-sided Warbler and successfully reproduced.” Well, if all we’ve heard about “species” and “speciation” is true, it shouldn’t just be extremely rare; it should be impossible. Hybridization is common among Golden-winged and Blue-winged 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 human anatomy instructor at the Western University of Health Sciences in Pomona, California. “What this new fossil shows is that enantiornithines, though totally separate from modern birds, evolved some of the same adaptations for highly refined, advanced flight styles.” … If enantiornithines in the late Cretaceous were just as advanced as modern birds, however, why did they die out with the dinosaurs while the ancestors 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 birds’ unparalleled ability to imitate sounds and human speech. Parrots are one of the few animals considered ‘vocal learners,’ meaning they can imitate sounds. Researchers have been trying to figure out why some bird species are better imitators than others. Besides differences in the sizes of particular brain regions, however, no other potential explanations have surfaced. By examining gene expression patterns, the new study found Read More ›