New Species Round-up for 2023, Part 2

In the previous article we looked briefly at those new amphibian and mammal species named during 2023. This time we skip ahead to reptiles… including birds because – yes – birds are reptiles in the phylogenetic sense)….

Alan Feduccia’s Romancing the Birds and Dinosaurs: Forays in Postmodern Paleontology

For something like four decades, Dr Alan Feduccia of the University of North Carolina has been arguing that everyone is wrong about dinosaurs….

Laysan Ducks: Not as Degenerate as People Used to Think

I really like ducks, and my god there’s a lot to say about them. Here, we look at a small Hawaiian duck that once stood on the very precipice of extinction, some sources saying that it was reduced to a single individual at one point. I speak, of course, of the famous Laysan duck Anas laysanensis…

Birdwatching in Oregon

Back in December 2022, I had the remarkable privilege of visiting Portland, Oregon, for a conference. I’ve longed to visit the Pacific Northwest for my entire life and this was my first ever visit there. It was a dream trip and I had an amazing time, and while there’s a lot I could talk about… today we’re here to discuss THE BIRDS...

Cases of Over-Enthusiastic Swallowing, Often (But Not Always) Ending in Death

Back in 2009 (at TetZoo ver 2, the ScienceBlogs version) I ran a series of articles on ‘over-enthusiastic swallowing’: on cases where carnivorous animals have died from choking. You see, carnivorous animals of many sorts often die from choking, and field biologists have done a good job of recording many such instances in the literature. In the interests of having this material available once more, rather than corrupted and only findable via the wayback machine, I’ve here gathered those articles together, and here they are again…