Tag Archives: birds

What’s the weirdest thing you learned this week? Well, whatever it is, we promise you’ll have an even weirder answer if you listen to PopSci’s hit podcast. The Weirdest Thing I Learned This Week hits Apple, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else you listen to podcasts every-other Wednesday morning. It’s your new favorite source for the strangest science-adjacent facts, figures, and …

Birds are not merely descendants of dinosaurs — they are dinosaurs. For Yale evolutionary biologist and ornithologist Richard Prum, birds have been a lifelong passion and a window into some of evolution’s most intriguing mysteries. In a wide-ranging conversation with co-host Janna Levin, Prum traces the deep evolutionary origins of feathers, which he argues first emerged not for flight but …

A study of five common Australian bird species in southeast Queensland has found on average, 4.8 percent of them have sexual organs that don’t align with their chromosomes. The authors don’t know the cause of the deviation from biology textbooks, nor how representative the findings are for avian populations elsewhere, but it does appear to be more common than thought …

About 5% of common Australian wild birds including kookaburras and lorikeets could have undergone a “sex reversal” where their genetic sex does not match their reproductive organs, according to a new study. The study is thought to be the first to find widespread sex reversal across multiple wild bird species, but the cause of the phenomenon is not yet known. …

Three dead birds in California’s Sacramento County have tested positive for West Nile virus. What’s happening? The Sacramento Bee summarized an announcement from the Sacramento-Yolo Mosquito and Vector Control District, which said these were the first three birds to be identified with the virus in the county this year. However, a mosquito sample 3.5 weeks ago tested positive for the …

Sometime between 16 and 11.6 million years ago, a young caiman came upon a tasty snack in modern-day South America. The meal, however, turned out to be rather ambitious, because the croc hadn’t come upon just any old prey. It was a phorusrhacid, a large carnivore in its own right, aptly known as a “terror bird.” The now-extinct terror bird …

Fossilized bite marks suggest there could have been a dramatic tussle between a gigantic terror bird and an even more massive crocodile around 12 million years ago. Phorusrhacids, commonly known as “terror birds,” were apex predators that terrorized prey in the ancient ecosystems of South America. While these flightless carnivores had little to fear on land, a new study, published …