I recently reread Dubach (1981), “Quantitative analysis of the respiratory system of the house sparrow, budgerigar and violet-eared hummingbird”, and realized that she reported both body masses and volumes in her Table 1. For each of the three species, here are the sample sizes, mean total body masses, and mean total body volumes, along with mean densities I calculated from those values. House sparrow, Passer domesticus , n

A few weeks ago I threw this picture into the “Night at the Museum” post and promised to say more later. Later is now. I started sculpting dinosaur claws because of the coincidental arrival of two things in my life. One was a cast of OMNH 780, the horrifically awesome thumb claw of Jurassic megapredator Saurophaganax maximus , which I blogged about here.

Earlier this spring London and I got on a building dinosaurs kick, inspired by this post at Tumblehome Learning. I used a few of these photos as filler in this post, but I haven’t talked much about what we did and what we learned. Above is my first attempt at a wire skeleton for a papier mache dinosaur. Yes, despite being a dino-geek from the age of three on, I had never made a papier mache dinosaur before this spring.

I happened to be browsing Gerald L. Woods superb Guinness Book of Animal Facts and Feats (3rd edition) this morning, and happened across this fragment on page 76: The wording struck me as strange: highest of any living warm-blooded animal? Is Wood just being redundant here, or is he implying that there are cold-blooded animals with a higher mass-specific metabolic rate? The idea seems inherently contradictory, doesn’t it?

Another blast from the past: Like the recent Compsognathus , this is a card from the “Flesh” card-game that was printed across several progs (issues) of the comic 2000 AD in 1977.

In a comment on the previous post, Emily Willoughby links to an excellent post on her own blog that discusses the “necks lie” problem in herons. Most extraordinarily, here are two photos of what seems to be the same individual: You should get over to Emily’s blog right now and read her article. (Kudos, too, for the Portal reference in the title. I’ve been playing Portal and Portal 2 obsessively for the last week.

Back when we were at Cambridge for the 2010 SVPCA, we saw taxidermied and skeletonised hoatzins, and were struck that the cervical skeleton was so very much longer than the neck as it appears in life — because necks lie.

Secretary bird: Matt pointed out to me something that in retrospect is obvious, though I’d never thought about it before: the eyelashes of birds are not homologous with ours, since mammals’ eyelashes are modified hairs and birds don’t have hair. Instead, their lashes are modified feathers. It would be interesting to see both kinds of eyelash under a microscope and compare.

More from my flying visit to the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I found this exhibition of bird eggs very striking. In particular, it was shocking how much bigger the elephant-bird egg is than that of the ostrich.