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 = 16,

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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: {.aligncenter .size-full .wp-image-6988 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6988” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/10/18/2000-ads-flagrantly-plagiarised-brontosaurus/2000ad-prog-10-back-cover-flesh-card-game-brontosaur/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/2000ad-prog-10-back-cover-flesh-card-game-brontosaur.jpeg” orig-size=“522,344” comments-opened=“1”

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.

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: {.alignnone .size-full .wp-image-6405 loading=“lazy” attachment-id=“6405” permalink=“http://svpow.com/2012/06/19/eyelashes-of-the-harvard-museum-of-natural-history/secretary/” orig-file=“https://svpow.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/secretary.jpeg” orig-size=“1280,960” comments-opened=“1” image-meta=“{"aperture":"4.5","credit":"","camera":"Canon PowerShot

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.