Word: birding
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...Woman of the Inner Sea, the intrigues and excesses of Sydney society provide delicious background and important plotting points. But the scenes are thin beside Kate's semi-legendary transformation into a tough bird of the outback. Keneally's long delay in revealing details about the death of Kate's children is a deliberate tease and annoyance...
Surprises crop up constantly. The latest: a new species from Mongolia, announced last week by Norell and several U.S. and Mongolian scientists. Known as Mononychus (meaning one claw), the turkey-size animal looked like a modern, flightless bird, complete with feathers, but had bone structures characteristic of both birds and dinosaurs. Its discovery cements the bird- dinosaur link even more firmly...
...that dates from 230 million years ago. Like the much later Tyrannosaurus, the Eoraptor belonged to the saurischian, or lizard-hipped, category of dinosaurs. (The name refers to the arrangement of its pelvic bones; the other category of dinosaurs, which includes Stegosaurus and other herbivores, is labeled ornithischian, or bird-hipped. Ironically, birds are descended from the lizard-hipped class...
...paleontology, though, the story has become much more muddled. The confusion began in 1964 with the discovery of a 13-ft.-long theropod called Deinonychus that was remarkably similar to Archaeopteryx, perhaps 50 million years more recent, but lacked wings and feathers. Apparently, the evolution from theropod to bird took many turns and detours...
There are researchers skeptical, of course, about how Mononychus is labeled and about the larger question of how dinosaurs are related to birds. But since scientists cannot really decide for sure whether Mononychus should be considered a primitive flightless bird or a dinosaur, it seems plausible that there is really no essential distinction: it was both...