New Zealand is home to several highly peculiar endemic parrots, with three similar-looking species being of particular interest: the Kakapo Strigops habroptila, Kea Nestor notabilis, and Kaka N. meridionalis. Here are taxiderm specimens of all three on display together (with other New Zealand endemic birds*) at Bexhill Museum, Bexhill, East Sussex. I can’t pretend to [...]

As a regular Tet Zoo reader (right?) you’ll be aware of the petrel series. I’m keen to finish it (hey, just as I am with all the other still-incomplete Tet Zoo series), so let’s crack on. In previous articles, we looked at gadfly-petrels, the members of Fulmarini, and also at the evolution, biology and diversity [...]

Mention ‘peacock’ (or ‘peafowl’) and the vast majority of people will think of Pavo cristatus, the mostly Indian, blue-plumaged Indian peacock. Distinctive features of the males of this species include a face marked with black and white stripes, a crest composed of wire-like shafts tipped with blue, fan-shaped tufts, orange-brown primary feathers, dark-brown-and-white stripes on [...]

Whenever I mention turkeys on Tet Zoo, it’s unavoidable that I (generally) mention or illustrate the turkey we know best: the domestic form of Meleagris gallopavo, the North American bird typically known as the Wild turkey. It’s big, with bronzy-brown plumage, a mostly pinkish head and neck and a wiry ‘beard’ that hangs down from [...]

Galliforms – gamebirds – are among the most spectacularly flamboyant of birds; the males of many lineages are provided with an abundance of elaborate display structures. I’ve written about turkeys and their snoods, wattles, caruncles and showy feathers before. I like the photo above because it depicts two of the showiest gamebirds – Meleagris gallopavo (domestic [...]

Two weeks ago I and colleagues published a new paper in the august open-access online pages of PLoS ONE. Led by Aleksandra Birn-Jeffery of the Royal Veterinary College, and co-authored by Charlotte Miller, Emily Rayfield, Dave Hone and myself, the paper is titled ‘Pedal claw curvature in birds, lizards and Mesozoic dinosaurs – complicated categories [...]

No time for anything new: I figure this is pretty self-explanatory. For anyone who wants to follow up on some of the assertions boldly stated in the slide above, check out… Berger, L. R. & Clarke, R. J. 1995. Eagle involvement in accumulation of the Taung child fauna. Journal of Human Evolution 29, 275-299. – [...]

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 [...]

After the long gestation period that’s typical of big, multi-authored volumes, the second edition of The Complete Dinosaur (Brett-Surman et al. 2012) has finally hit the bookstores and I’m now in happy possession of my own copy. The Complete Dinosaur first appeared in 1997 as a compendium of all things dinosaur. Edited by Jim Farlow and [...]