Disastrousfeline - Circuitposter Extraordinaire

"find relief. the end comes swiftly for you" reads like a death threat

the limbus skrinkled version

space kitty again ow my hand hurts remember how i said i had a cool idea for the colors on this animation??so yeh i exported each frame and painted it the frames look quite satisfying, here are some stills

Elaeomyxa Cerifera, first identified in 1942. This slime mold sporophores split open to release spores which sparkle like a disco ball. It looks like a whole Galaxy in a single mushroom.

Photos: John Robinson

Bird Poll Explanation & Follow Up

So! This will be a long post, but I promise its worth it.

You know that whole "Kingdom Phylum Class Order Family Genus Species" thing you (probably) learned in school?

That system we use to classify living things (aka organisms)?

Weeeeeell.. that system was made by a guy who didn't know about evolution. Or prehistoric life.

Buuuut now we do. And turns out, most things? Don't really fit into the categories we made up based only on the living things we have today.

What this means is, while today we can be pretty sure when something is a bird - does it have feathers? is it warm blooded? - that system doesn't really work when we look at extinct life forms. These features that make a bird, a bird, evolved in a messy, progressive way over time.

All we can say, with certainty, is that living birds are birds, and that their closest relatives - crocodilians - are not birds, because we defined birds to exclude crocodilians, and vice versa.

Today, scientists group organisms based on their evolutionary relationships, rather than traits or that hierarchy (KPCORFGS) that you learned in school. In fact, Kingdom phylum etc. is quite out of date! We still use the terms so that people have some point of familiarity, but ultimately, we just group things based on their ancestral ties - what is related to what.

As such, all animals in the fossil record that we find that are closer to living birds, than to living crocodilians, are on the Bird Evolutionary Line. They are in a group we call "Pan-Aves" (Total-Birds) - everything that is closer to being a bird than it is to being any other living thing.

This group consists of a lot of different things:

including pterosaurs and everything we've ever called a dinosaur, and also - of course - all living birds.

In fact, Dinosaurs are defined as the most recent ancestor the first two dinosaurs named - Iguanodon and Megalosaurus - had, and all of that ancestor's descendants. This means every bird is a living dinosaur, because they all descend from that ancestor!

So, every member of the Panaves group is, technically, a bird - because it is closer to being a bird than it is to being literally anything else. However, it feels weird to call this thing:

a bird. It is, or at least that's the thing its closest to today, but.... you wouldn't call it that if you saw it.

So, at any point between the base of the bird family tree, and the top of it - ie, all living birds - you can start calling these animals "true birds". The question is when you do.

Is the first bird the first animal with feathers? Well, we've seen modern type feathers in Pterosaurs, those cousins of dinosaurs that people keep thinking are dinosaurs for some reason:

This is Sordes, aka Animal A, an early kind of pterosaur. We see simple feathers (single strands of fluff) on lots of different pterosaurs, but recently we found full fledged feathers - the thing you think of when you hear the word - on one species of pterosaur, Tupandactylus. So, are pterosaurs birds?

Well, I mean, they were flying animals. But they didn't fly like birds. Their method of flight, which is the most unique method of flight in the world, evolved later. Pterosaurs simply stretched a membrane of skin across their fingers and to their legs, creating lift from that structure. So calling them birds is both misleading - birds did not evolve directly from them! - and unfair, because they're an interesting and unique group of flying animals in their own right.

You might say - let's go to where warm bloodedness evolved, then - but that's a mess too! We don't really know when. We do know, however, that pterosaurs *and* dinosaurs were warm blooded - if not outright, then close enough for government work.

Okay then - birds have hollow bones. So do pterosaurs! And so do some, but not all, dinosaurs. So that's not going to work.

In fact, there is no clear point at which to say something is a bird, a proper modern bird.

Is it when dinosaurs diverged from pterosaurs? The line that includes birds from this group?

This is Silesaurus, aka Animal B, an early dinosaur relative (or possibly a dinosaur, long story). It has its limbs mostly under its body, like dinosaurs, and feathers all over its form. But it really doesn't have much more in common with birds than that.

So is it Dinosaurs? Are all dinosaurs birds? This is when the limbs go directly underneath the body - the most distinct difference between dinosaurs and other reptiles.

This is Kulindadromeus, aka Animal C, and while it is quite bird like, it is from that other side of the dinosaur group - Ornithischians, not Saurischians. In fact, Ornithischians don't have hollow bones like birds! We think hollow bones may have evolved multiple times. Plus, if Kulinda's a bird, so are Stegosaurus and Triceratops. Things most of y'all probably wouldn't want to call birds.

So is it Saurischians? The side with birds? This side has most members with hollow bones (the earliest Saurischians don't), and bird-like lungs.

This is Thecodontosaurus, aka Animal D, a "Prosauropod" - ancestor to those huge long necked dinosaurs like "Brontosaurus". It is more birdie than Kulindadromeus, but... not in ways we can really see. Plus, do you really want to call this:

A bird? I mean, it technically is, but is that where we're drawing the line?

Okay, let's jump forward a bit. When do dinosaurs evolve feathers on the arm like bird wings? For that, we have to go far down the Theropod side of the tree - literally pass by famous things like Allosaurus and Tyrannosaurus - and get to Maniraptoriformes, like the "ostrich dinosaurs":

Remember those Gallimimus that Alan Grant had to run from in Jurassic Park? The flocking this way guys? Yeah, they looked more like this (the image above is of Rativates, a close cousin, aka Animal E). This is where we see feathered arms that look like wings. They weren't proper wings yet - not quite big enough, not quite organized the same way - but unless you're physically lifting up the arm and looking at it close up, you really can't tell.

This is where most of y'all, just on sight, call the animals birds! But we aren't fully done with the evolutionary story yet! Wings originally evolved in dinosaurs for display - to look fancy to other dinosaurs!

In fact, even at the next step - Pennaraptorans, shown here by Animal F, Anzu - while the wings are closer to what we'd see in modern birds, they're still not quite big enough. We might get gliding, or at least some lift in movement, in the smallest members - but not much more.

Current evidence points to bird-type flight evolving in the next group, Paraves - we have evidence of flight in raptor dinosaurs like Microraptor - which look something like this:

This is animal G, Deinonychus, a close cousin of Velociraptor. While these larger members of the group couldn't fly, their smaller relatives probably could! At this point, we see consistently large, bird-like wings, very similar to modern forms - huge wings that can generate lift.

However, not all living birds can fly - quite a lot can't. Is that really where we want to say they're birds?

This is animal H, Archaeopteryx. It was the first feathered dinosaur ever described, commonly called the "missing link" between reptiles and birds, and often is named the first bird. However, this group - Avialae - doesn't have any new particularly birdie features. Archaeopteryx and co have slightly smaller heads than Velociraptor and co did. That's about it. While we used to start calling animals birds here, it is becoming more and more arbitrary the more we learn about the evolutionary history of birds. There's nothing really more birdie about this than Microraptor. What's the next thing that isn't arbitrary?

At Pygostylia, the long bony tail of other dinosaurs is finally shortened into the tiny fused structure we see in modern birds! This is Lectavis, an "opposite bird" - a group of dinosaurs that oriented their wings in the exact opposite way as modern birds. These animals are virtually indistinguishable from modern birds... except for one nasty detail: they still have teeth.

In fact, teeth persist in dinosaurs right until modern birds finally appear. The thing that distinguishes the group of Crown Birds - the group that contains all living birds and things that descended from their most recent common ancestor and nothing else, called Neornithes - from their closest relatives is not having teeth.

This is Vegavis, one of the first known Crown-Birds (Neornitheans). It is actually closer to ducks than it is to other birds! It's in the duck group! And it, like all living birds, does not have proper teeth - just a beak (beaks and teeth are not exclusive, many species have both - just not living birds).

So, we *have* to call Vegavis a bird, because it's in that Neornithes group. We *can* call Aphanosaurs birds, because they're closer to birds than anything else. But whether or not you call that or anything else in between a bird? It's really up to you. There is no wrong answer, because, in the end - all of these are steps on the way to bird, while still being their own full-fledged creatures. It's not like Microraptor and co were trying to be birds - they were just trying to survive. And to survive, they became more birdie.

Remember, there's no right *or* wrong answer! Follow your dreams! Vote for your choice!

Okay, animal H is a pretty wrong answer, IMO, it's just letting old white men of the past define what a bird is for us, but that's all the direction I'm giving y'all.

Please Please Please reblog this! I want it to escape Palaeoblr, both so that we can compare both data sets - before you got this info, and after - and also so that everyone who wanted to see the explanation can see it!!! Boost!! Boooost!!!

sources for everything are just, I'm a paleontologist. that's the source. but I can provide proper papers on request.