There are surprisingly few good books on the evolution and fossil history of birds: among those I recommend are Luis Chiappe’s Glorified Dinosaurs: The Origin and Early Evolution of Birds (Chiappe 2007), Gary Kaiser’s The Inner Bird: Anatomy and Evolution (Kaiser 2007), and Gerald Mayr’s Paleogene Fossil Birds (Mayr 2009). In view of this, Gareth [...]

Here’s an old article ‘from the archives’. Actually, it’s two articles combined: both originally appeared at Tet Zoo ver 1 in 2006, and both are included together in Tetrapod Zoology Book One. I’ve made no effort to update the text (bar minor tweaks). If I did, I’d write about the various new Cretaceous fleas and [...]

Like modern birds, and like their close relatives among the theropod dinosaurs, the birds of the Mesozoic Era laid eggs and, we reasonably infer, made nests. But what else do we know about reproductive behaviour in Mesozoic birds? Essentially, we know very little, and by “very little” I actually mean “just about nothing”. A new [...]

Time to recycle more old text, this time from my aborted dinosaur field guide project. Long-time Tet Zoo readers will know what I’m talking about (for more discussion see this article on ornithomimosaurs and this one on ankylosaurs). Jibeinia luanhera is a Lower Cretaceous toothed bird, named for the Hebei Region and Luanhe River in [...]