Currently, the crews of the Morrison Natural History Museum and the Best Western Denver Southwest are manning a large booth in the lobby of the Alamo Drafthouse of Littleton, Colorado, taking part of the hype that has accompanied the release of the new Jurassic World movie. People have been clawing to get in and see the movie, and are pretty excited to see some awesome fossils and fossil casts right there in the lobby!
The Acrocanthosaurus arm clawing its way towards the Alamo Drafthouse building.
Fran, the most complete skull of Acrocanthosaurus ever discovered. A giant cousin of Allosaurus, this skull was discovered in Oklahoma, and would have lived during the Early Cretaceous Period, around 110 million years ago. The dinosaur was first described in 1950 by paleontologists J. Willis Stovall and Wann Langston Jr.
A Tyrannosaurus rex arm picks the nose of the Acrocanthosaurus. Now that's something you don't see every day.
Matt Mossbrucker, the entire Tally family clan, Justin Sewell from TheOneRing.net, and myself have been here since Thursday, talking with folks before and after their movie experience. Part of what makes the Alamo Drafthouse experience particularly interesting is they do a half hour preshow, where they pull awesome old footage and fun videos that relate to the feature presentation, so you get to enjoy a half hour of awesome old dinosaur footage as well! So definitely come on by and say hello, and enjoy the movie while you're here!
Matthew Mossbrucker, Director and Chief Curator of the Morrison Natural History Museum, poses next to the gigantic femur of the Brachiosaurus, with the Acrocanthosaurus skull slung over one shoulder and the Camarasaurus skull in the other. Imagine how cool you would look carrying that Brachiosaurus femur around in a hotel parking lot.
Merlin Barnes, Outreach Specialist at Dinosaur Ridge, our neighbors both at the Drafthouse and in real life.
I got to watch Jurassic World this afternoon, and I was very pleased with the movie, I thought it was very entertaining and a great movie overall! For the next few days, I'm going to spend as much time as I can talking about different aspects of the movie, both accurate and inaccurate aspects of it, for all of your reading and viewing pleasure! Some topics I plan to talk about include:
I had a lot of fun watching the movie, and I'm still having fun talking with the crowds of people entering and exiting the theater, hyped up and excited to learn more about dinosaurs and their prehistoric contemporaries! I'm also looking forward to using the movie as an opportunity to engage people about dinosaurs, and hopefully you who are still reading this post will, too.
Matthew Mossbrucker (left) and Greg Tally, co-owner of the Best Western Denver Southwest Dino Hotel, walk the Brachiosaurus femur out of the lobby of the hotel, on its way to the Alamo Drafthouse. We thought it could use a nice explosion in the background, so....
For those of you who watching the Broncos/Seahawks game right now, you might have noticed clips of a random bird of prey flying around which, if you're anything like me, that was the highlight of the entire game. Named Taima, the bird is the mascot for the Seattle Seahawks football team, an augur hawk (Buteo rufofuscus). Although sometimes referred to as the augur buzzard, I prefer the name augur hawk, as buzzard is sometimes a bit of a confusing name.* According to the Seahawks website, Taima has been the "first one out of the tunnel" prior to every game.** The augur hawk is one of the most common hawks in Africa, and inhabits an enormous portion of the eastern and central part of the continent. Open plains, grasslands, and forests are the augur's preferred habitat, fairly similar to its close North American cousin, the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jaimaicensis).
The broad-winged hawk (Buteo platypterus) is one of the smallest members of the genus, and a hawk that's involved in a very interesting new project, the aptly named "Broad-Winged Hawk Project." Similar in many ways to the OCEARCH shark tracking project, the BWHP is using satellite telemetry technology to track broad-winged hawks on their migration from Pennsylvania, all the way down to Central and South America. You can join in the tracking fun by clicking on the link HERE! Several of the nestling broad-wings were from pretty close to where my friend Zach Evens's cabin in Pennsylvania was that we visited in August!
There are a ton of other hawks in the genus Buteo besides the red-tail, augur, and broad-wing, several of which we've talked about here on the blog, such as the red-shouldered hawk (B. lineatus), rough-legged hawk (B. lagopus), and the Swainson's hawk (B. swainsoni).
*In the Americas, a buzzard typically refers to a vulture, while in the Old World, buzzard is often attributed to members of the genus Buteo, of which the augur hawk is a member. We Americans tend to refer to buteos simply as hawks, which is part of what can lead to this confusion.
**For those of you not in the know, the tunnel is not a metaphorical tunnel, and instead refers to a legit tunnel that leads from the locker room onto the stadium.
Recently, the folks over at the Best Western Denver Southwest purchased yet another fossil cast for their amazing hotel!* This time, the cast is of a skull nicknamed "Judith," a specimen that is referred by some paleontologists to the dinosaur genus Ceratops. And, no, I didn't mean to say Triceratops. Don't feel bad if you haven't heard of Ceratops montanus: as a matter of fact, I hadn't really heard of it either until several weeks ago, when Greg Tally informed me that the Morrison Natural History Museum would soon be receiving a very large box in the mail! Judith is still in the Cretaceous Room here at the MNHM, where she will stay for at least a few more weeks. I really didn't know much at all about this dinosaur, and was eager to learn more. Unfortunately, there's not much out there, as Ceratops is based on just a few bones that were discovered in the late 1800s. Despite the lack of material, Ceratops does have a pretty fascinating history, and is an incredibly important dinosaur; not because of what has been discovered about the fossils themselves, so much as what these fossils resulted in.
Greg Tally peers through one of the fenestrae (literally means "window" in Latin) in the skull of Judith, the Ceratops montanus skull for the hotel that is temporarily on display at the Morrison Museum. Photo Credit: Greg and Meredith Tally
When it comes to giving an animal or a group of animals a scientific classification, there are a lot of hoops you have to jump through, and a bunch of rules you have to follow. Sometimes, groups of animals are named after the best known and understood animal in that group. For example, Stegosaurus is the genus of dinosaur that defined the group of animals called the stegosaurs, and Tyrannosaurus is the genus of dinosaur that defined the group of animals called the tyrannosaurs. Sometimes, it isn't quite as simple. Think about it this way: Las Vegas is easily the most famous city in Nevada, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who spent a significant portion of their childhood thinking that Las Vegas was the capital of Nevada. However, it is Carson City that holds the official title of capital. Even though Las Vegas receives much more attention than Carson City, the state of Nevada isn't simply going to change where its capital is, and to the best of my knowledge, a change like that never really happens.
Although that comparison was a bit of a stretch and had about as many holes as the skull of Chasmosaurus, I think you get my point. The same thing goes for scientific names. Although Triceratops is the best known individual of the dinosaurian group called the ceratopsians, this group is still called the ceratopsians, as opposed to being called the triceratopsians. That's because it was Ceratops, and not Triceratops, that was described by scientists first.
Ceratops montanus, temporarily on display at the Morrison Natural History Museum. Photo Credit: Greg and Meredith Tally
The year was 1888, and paleontology in western North America was still going strong. We've talked about the Bone Wars between paleontologists Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope before, and we are going to revisit Marsh in this post. To maximize the number of fossils he could describe, Marsh called upon the talents of a large number of fossil collectors, including the always brilliant Arthur Lakes in Morrison, Colorado. Another of these collectors was a man named John Bell Hatcher. Although Hatcher should also be remembered for a large number of his contributions to paleontology, for our purposes here we remember Hatcher as the man who discovered Ceratops. On a trip to a known dinosaur fossil site near the Judith River in Montana, Hatcher discovered a number of fossils. One of these fossil discoveries was composed only of a pair of horn cores.
Doesn't sound like much, does it? Well, truth be told, it wasn't, though it was enough for Marsh to realize that he had something new. If you click HERE, you can view the two page paper that Marsh published in 1888 that briefly described this new discovery as an animal called "Ceratops montanus." There are several things of interest that we should take away from this paper, some of which are:
Marsh originally suspected that this new creature was "nearly allied to Stegosaurus of the Jurassic, but differs especially in having had a pair of large horns on the upper part of the head." Marsh got the location of the horns right, but the close relation to Stegosaurus.....not so much. Given the enormously tiny sampling of bones he had to work with though, it's not a surprise that Marsh compared this new animal to something that he already knew a good deal about. Keep in mind that this is the very first scientific description of a ceratopsian dinosaur, so Marsh just had to go off of what had already been discovered. Which was nothing.
Marsh notes that the "position and direction" of the horns could be likened to the enormous Meiolania, an extinct turtle from Australia, as well as the lizards in the genus Phrynosomax, the horned lizards. He also notes that amongst the dinosaurs, the "only known example of a similar structure....is the single median horn-core on the nasals of Ceratosaurus," a mid-sized theropod dinosaur from the Late JurassicMorrison Formation.
In 1887, the year before this paper was published, geologist Whitman Cross sent Marsh a pair of horn cores about two feet in length and six inches across at their widest point. Discovered right smack dab in the middle of where Denver, Colorado is today, Cross relayed to Marsh that they had been discovered in beds of Cretaceous rock. Marsh, however, decided that these horns must have belonged to some sort of enormous bison, and gave the horns the name "Bison alticornis." Perhaps Marsh was still suffering from the misconception that the 1887 discovery was, indeed, an enormous extinct bison, as these 1887 Denver horn cores are not mentioned in the brief Ceratops paper. It is mentioned, however, that if the horns were discovered "detached," their "resemblance in form and position of the posterior horn-cores to those of some of the ungulate mammals is very striking," and the horns would "naturally be referred to that group." I have no evidence to support my hypothesis, but I wonder whether this comparison to the mammalian ungulates is insurance on the part of Marsh, as perhaps at this point he had recognized the true nature of the 1887 horn cores. This is pure conjecture on my part, and is mostly irrelevant anyways, as in 1889 Marsh recognized the dinosaurian nature of the Denver cores, and referred them to the genus Ceratops. Today, these horn cores are regarded as belonging to Triceratops.
Marsh mentions that several limb bones, vertebrae, and teeth were also found in the Ceratops horizon, as well as several bits of dermal armor, and states that he believes they also belonged to Ceratops. Whether this is true or not I do not know, but what I do know to be false is Marsh's next sentence, in which he states that the bones "indicate a close affinity with Stegosaurus, which was probably the Jurassic ancestor of Ceratops." The specimen is housed in the Smithsonian today, under the catalogue number USNM 2411. A search through the online records of the Smithosonian shows that 2411 consists only of a partial skull, which seems to be consistent with what I've read in other sources. I'm not sure whether these other skeletal elements mentioned above have found a definitive dinosaurian home, or whether their true owner is uncertain.
The final paragraph is, in my opinion, inarguably the most important. The paragraph reads as follows: "The remains at present referred to this genus, while resembling Stegosaurus in various important characters, appear to represent a distinct and highly specialized family, that may be called the Ceratopsidae." In this paragraph, Marsh has created the group of dinosaurs that, more colloquially, we refer to as the ceratopsians. Or, more colloquially than that, "those dinosaurs that look like Triceratops with those horns."
Ceratops was discovered in what scientists now call the Judith River Formation. Several other ceratopsians have been discovered in this formation, and due to the small amount and fragmentary nature of the material that was originally described as Ceratops, most paleontologists consider the dinosaur to be a nomen dubium. Nomen dubium pretty much means that the material is too fragmentary for it to be diagnostic, and can't really be used in the future to determine whether new specimens are the same as the original or not. Whether or not the newly discovered Judith specimen currently on display at the Morrison Museum is, indeed, Ceratops is still up in the air, as the paper has not been published yet. Almost all of my Ceratops knowledge is out on the table for all to see, so I am not going to speculate or attempt to draw conclusions about something that I don't really know enough about to have an informed opinion on. Guess we will just have to wait and see! In the meantime, come on by the Morrison Natural History Museum and the Best Western Denver Southwest to see Judith, and much more!
*If you've been living underground amongst worms and fossils for the last few months, you might not have heard of the hotel, so you can check out some incredible pictures of the best Best Western by clicking HERE and HERE.
As I mentioned IN THE LAST POST, the Best Western Denver Southwest is nearing its completion! Soon, it will be the most powerful natural history hotel/museum in the entire galaxy! In this post, we are going to see more of what makes this dinosaur hotel so freaking awesome! Let's check out some of the skulls and bones that are going to go in the hotel! First off, an awesome skull of an Acrocanthosaurus!
A bunch of other awesome bones for the hotel were delivered a few months ago to the Morrison Natural History Museum since the lobby at the hotel wasn't finished yet! Any guesses as to what is inside of the crate?
I hate to say it, but your guesses were probably wrong. Here is what was inside, with Pyg modeling for scale! First off, a pair of Brachiosaurus femora!
One day when the Pachycephalosaurus skull was at the museum, Dr. Bob came in one day with a few other pachycephalosaur skulls belonging to Stygimoloch and Dracorex, and had us paint them!
You can see that all three skulls are approximately the same size: there's NO way that they are all the same animal, as some paleontologists believe!
Another great picture of the Pachycephalosaurus skull!
And the third and final awesome skull, a Camarasaurus!
The hotel has many other cool specimens, such as this Allosaurus skull, which was in the lobby!
Not only are there some FANTASTIC skulls, the hotel has some casts of fossil skeletons, as well! Here is the plan for Wadsworth the Stegosaurus, hanging above the front desk!
First, here is Good Sir Wadsworth before being brought inside!
Wadsworth being hung up!
And finally, the lobby, complete in all of its glory! Notice the Brachiosaurus femora off to the left, and the Edmontosaurus skull in the cabinet around the middle of the picture!
Here are some more great pictures from the lobby! Here are the curiosity cabinets under construction:
And the final product, with the Allosaurus skull above the fireplace!
If you travel to the dining hall, right off the lobby, you can enjoy lots of fun food, just as an enormous Tylosaurus (now named Sophie) would have done 70 million years ago! First, some pictures of Sophie!
The flipper of the specimen!
As we mentioned before, this Tylosaurus wasn't hungry when it died! In the stomach of this beatsie are the remains of a small creature called Dolichorhynchops! To learn more about both Tylosaurus and Dolichorhynchops, click the link HERE!
Some days, you can also check out a fun-filled and exciting fossil table, crammed full of awesome goodies! Here are several shots of that!
They also have an awesome donation box for the Morrison Museum! This mosasaur skull, belonging to another Western Interior Seaway critter called Clidastes, will sit inside of it!
Indeed, this hotel is full of prehistoric from top to bottom! Actually, literally to the top, as the hotel will have a Pteranodon weathervane! Here are the plans, and the actual weathervane itself!
Want to hear more about the hotel, but just won't be in the area anytime soon? Not a problem! Like their Facebook page by clicking HERE! Not only do they share lots of awesome pictures and fun facts, they also create lots of fun Dino Memes! Here is one of my favorites (partly because they included a link to our Xiphactinus: The Inception Fossil post when they uploaded the picture to Facebook!), but partly because it's an awesome meme!
And here is the first in a series of "Fun Fact" memes that I am working on with the Tally's!
You've probably heard me mention the Best Western Denver Southwest several times here on the blog: they are the folks who are changing their hotel into a dinosaur themed natural history museum/hotel extravaganza! Well, the lobby is now complete, as is much of the rest of the dinosaur themed paraphernalia around the grounds! Just a few more things are awaiting completion, but the hotel looks fantastic! I thought I'd share some pictures of the hotel for you guys here! For your information, the credit for all of the photos in this post goes to the Best Western Denver Southwest, unless it is otherwise noted or there is a stuffed Triceratops named Pyg in the picture! But first, you should meet the stars of the hotel: the Tally family!
First, let's start on the outside of the hotel! Here are the initial plans for the outside of the hotel:
And here is who greets you now when you walk inside: Stanley, the Stegosaurus!
Now, the lobby only just recently finished construction. Until recently, the lobby entrance looked like this:
The lobby just finished construction and looks GREAT now, but first let's look at a few more construction pictures, just so you can get a feel for how far along everything has come! First let's take a look at the pool! In the far future, the room should be partially enclosed from the outdoors!
At the beginning of construction, this place looked like it does in the picture below with Meredith!
A few months later, we have their two children, Caroline and Joe Tally, talking about the future plans for the pool with a camera crew from the BBC!
Finally, here are some pictures of the pool from very recently, it is now finished!
At least, the pool itself is finished. Sometime starting next year, the Tally's will be hiring someone to create a tile mosaic of some creatures that inhabited the Western Interior Seaway (which you can read more about HERE). Oh....and did I forget to mention that the pool is in the shape of the seaway? Pretty frickin' awesome if you ask me!
Now, a few pictures back, I mentioned that Joe and Caroline were talking to a BBC camera crew. What was that all about? Well, as you can imagine, this whole dinosaur hotel idea has been pretty popular to a whole lot of folks, and has made an appearance across a very wide range of media, one of which was a BBC story about it! Check out the link HERE! I also have several pictures of the filming! First off, we have several pictures of the camera on Greg!
As you might have noticed in the video, the film crew also stopped at the Morrison Natural History Museum, my place of work! There they interviewed the director and curator Matt Mossbrucker, and you can see a few of those pictures below!
Here the film crew watches as Matt excavates part of an Apatosaurus skull named Kevin upstairs in the lab!
Another big break for the hotel came from The Oatmeal! We have a lot to cover here in this post so I won't take the time to delve into it myself, but you absolutely HAVE to check it out by clicking HERE: it is fantastic, I guarantee it! These three screenshots below are credited to The Oatmeal!
It doesn't stop there, though! The Tallys have also been featured in Entrepreneur magazine! Here is a picture of the article, and you can read it yourself by clicking the link HERE!
And on the lighter side of things: have you ever heard of the popular YouTube series My Drunk Kitchen? If not, make sure to check it out because it is hysterical: but especially make sure to check out the episode with the hotel and the museum in it! Suffice it to say, the Tallys have definitely found their way down many different avenues of pop culture!
I don't really find it that surprising: what they're doing is freaking awesome! Check out these murals that they are having painted on the back of the building! The first one is a sort of walk through time, featuring all sorts of fun animals! The close up below is of a prehistoric mammal called Uintatherium!
Here's another mural for you to check out:
As if that isn't enough awesome paleo art for you, hanging in the rooms will be copies of some of the watercolors made by an awesome paleontologist named Arthur Lakes who excavated a lot of cool things from the area, including some of the bones that we have in the museum!
There are also some awesome banners hanging on the poles outside the hotel!
These aren't the only reasons why the hotel is super cool, though: not by a long shot! Usually every week, they have a Bird of Prey show and a Jungle Lady show!
First some pictures from the bird of prey shows! First, a few pictures of Anne Price holding a barn owl!
Next, we have a picture of her holding a turkey vulture!
The Jungle Lady is really cool too, here are some pictures of the animals that she brings, too! Here's Meredith with the albino Burmese python!
And an albino hedgehog!
Here's a picture of a veiled chameleon named Prince Charming!
This post is really long: I am splitting it up into two parts! Check back next time to learn about what REALLY makes the dinosaur hotel a DINOSAUR hotel!
On Thursday, I published the first of our two-parter "Top TenVultures" posts, all in honor of International Vulture Awareness Day! (Learn more HERE.) In the last post, we looked at only the Old World Vultures, a group of birds that are native to Asia, Africa, and Europe. Today, we will be looking at the New World Vultures who, despite their name, are not actually very closely related to the Old World Vultures at all! Instead, the similarities in body design between the two different groups is a result of one of my favorite topics of all time, convergent evolution! So let's do it: the last five of the top ten! Meet my favorite five New World Vultures! (For the previous post in the Top Ten Vultures duology, click HERE.)
5. Number five on the list is the turkey vulture, a classic vulture for us Coloradans! The only vulture alive today in Colorado (I suppose the occasional black vulture may wander in from the south), the turkey vulture is what many people think of when they hear the word "vulture." I have noticed a lot (thirty or more) of turkey vultures circling this one place on the CU Boulder campus, so I am planning a little excursion to figure out what it is that is drawing them to that particular spot in such large numbers! Recently, the folks at the Raptor Education Foundation brought a turkey vulture in to the Best Western Denver Southwest, a fun hotel that is currently undergoing renovations to become a functioning natural history museum! (REF website HERE, BWDS website HERE.) So here are some awesome pictures from that event! If you guys ever get a chance to check out one of the presentations given by the folks at the Raptor Education Foundation, you definitely should go, it is a REAL treat! In the pictures below, you can see the curator of the foundation, Anne Price, holding the turkey vulture, while the director, Peter Reshetniak (background), tells us a great deal about the bird!
4. With nearly a ten foot wingspan, the California condor is the largest flying bird in North America! (If you're having trouble visualizing ten feet, either go purchase ten one-foot long rulers and lay them end to end or, more simply, go find a good-sized California condor and stretch out its wings. That's probably the best visual right there.) The California condor is unfortunately labeled "Critically Endangered" by the IUCN, and it has experienced a pretty good comeback, and hopefully will continue to do so well into the future! According to the IUCN website, the last six remaining wild individuals were brought into captivity for captive breeding purposes, making the species "Extinct in the Wild." However, due to intense involvement from scientists, the species is on the rise, with around 213 individuals in the wild!
3. Meet the only fossil vulture on our Top Ten list, Phasmagyps! Some paleontologists are unsure whether Phasmagyps is actually a vulture, and this uncertainty is definitely understandable, as Phasmagyps is known from but a single bone! If it is a vulture, then Phasmagyps might be the oldest known New World vulture! Discovered in a Colorado quarry containing a number of fossils belonging to a 35 million year old rhinoceros called Trigonias, this single bone is now housed in the collections facility of the University of Colorado Boulder! I'm not really sure what I'm doing yet, but I've tried to input a request to check out the bone, we'll see how that goes!
2. Meet the Andean condor, one of the largest flying birds alive today, with more than a ten foot wingspan! With an incredible lifespan of over 75 years in captivity, the Andean condor, much like most animals that live for a very long time, does not reproduce very quickly: and therein lies its vulnerability. If, say, half of the population of Andean condors was shot in one year by humans, then it would take much longer for the population density to regain its former glory. By contrast, if you destroy half of the population of, say, rats, then they would almost certainly regain their former numbers very quickly, as they reproduce at an alarmingly fast rate. (The same principle applies to the California condor, who we talked about above.) Fortunately, the Andean condor is nowhere near as vulnerable to extinction as its close relative, the California condor.
1. At last, we come to my most favorite vulture of all time: the king vulture! This guy is absolutely ridiculous looking, resembling a cross between a vulture, a turkey, and who knows what else! It also has a very fun scientific name: Sarcoramphus papa! Don't exactly know what it means, but I like to think it has something to do with being the Vulture Daddy. I found on some sources online that the blood and feathers of the king vulture were used by the ancient Mayans to help cure disease, but I couldn't find any more information on that: all I found was the exact same sentence copied over and over again: "The bird's blood and feathers were also used to cure diseases." An enigmatic sentence for a very engimatic looking bird. But let's face it: it just looks awesome.
Thanks again for joining us today! I do hope I have made you more aware of vultures of an international level! But seriously, check out their page: http://www.vultureday.org/2013/index.php
As I mentioned in a post just a few days ago about the Harris hawk (which you can read by clicking HERE), the fantastic dinosaur-themed remodel at the Best Western Denver Southwest is well underway, and the folks over there are making the hotel even more fantastic by having weekly raptor (bird of prey) shows on Saturdays! Each Saturday, Anne Price, one of the folks over at the Raptor Education Foundation, brings over four birds of prey to show to the audience! Last week, they brought over a Harris hawk (which, like I already mentioned, I talked about in a previous post), a prairie falcon, a red-tailed hawk, and a great-horned owl! I have so much information I wanted to share with you...but how! How could I POSSIBLY share all of this information in a non-story like, brain-dumpy fashion? AH-HAH! Another 23-Fact Tuesday is upon us! But before you enjoy, make sure you check out the website for the Raptor Education Foundation by clicking HERE, and checking out the Facebook page for the Best Western Denver Southwest by clicking HERE!
1. This particular prairie falcon actually used to fly down at the Air Force Academy, where many of the cadets have the option of training a falcon!
2. The great-horned owl used to be the only member of the genus Bubo (what a fun name, right?), but around ten years ago, scientists reclassified the snowy owl to be the second member of the genus.
5. In response to this behavior on the part of the falcons, some prey species of bird have developed very tough feathers on their back and such to defend themselves against such attacks.
6. In nocturnal owls, like the great horned owl, the eyes are surrounded by a sort of sensory dish full of hyper-sensitive feathers that can actually detect sound, funneling it into the “dish.”
7. Diurnal owls, such as the burrowing owls, do not have this dish, or at least it is not as pronounced as other owls that are more active at night. The burrowing owl is actually most active at dawn and dusk, although it can function perfectly well at night.
8. Red-tailed hawks apparently love to nest in cottonwood trees. I think I might have actually found a red-tailed hawk nest in a cottonwood tree: hopefully, there will be more information on that in a later post!
A red-tailed hawk nest in what might or might not be a cottonwood tree....Photo Credit: gaiagarden.blogspot.com
9. The great-horned owl that Anne brought in for the presentation is DEFINITELY a survivor: he has survived being shot, hit by a car, West Nile Virus, and being attacked by another owl!
10. Here's the scoop: this particular great-horned owl first came to the sanctuary because it was hit by a car which, in the long run, probably saved its life. The reason why it hit the car in the first place was that it was flying drunkenly about due to the fact that it had West Nile Virus, which had caused its brain to go a little loopy. The owl received the medical treatment that it needed, and it wasn’t until a few years later, when it accidentally broke its leg, that a full X-Ray was ordered, and it was revealed that the owl had a few pellets lodged in its back. The skin had grown around it and completely healed, but yeah. Still. What a trooper!
11. You might have noticed on some of these great-horned owl pictures that the pupil of the left eye is MUCH more dilated than the pupil on the right eye. This is because this great-horned owl is blind is his left eye, due to the brush with West Nile Virus we were just talking about.
12. Later on, there was an enclosure that contained three great horned owls: two males that could fly and an older, grumpier female that couldn’t really fly that well. The two males could EASILY avoid the female by remaining up in the top of the enclosure, where the female simply could not reach them. However, one time, the people walked into the enclosure to find this particular male great horned owl perched next to the grumpy female. The female didn’t seem to be displaying any hostility towards him, so they left them together. After a few weeks, I believe, the female had decided that she had had enough, and attacked the male, and I believe broke his wing. He can fly today, but not terribly well, and not very far.
13. Not all red-tailed hawks have a red tail. There is a wide variety of coloric differences across its vast range, and sometimes even melanistic forms are seen. This DEFINITELY messes with birders!
A melanistic red-tailed hawk! Melanistic, FYI, would be just like a melanistic jaguar, where the coat of the animal is very, very dark, much darker than noraml, due to a pigment issue in its genes! Photo Credit: thenatureniche.com
14. As a matter of fact, none of them have red-tails their first year! At that point in their life, their tails are a darkish gray-brown: muddy and dull with darker brown stripes.
15. The juveniles don’t actually get their red tails until they molt, which, at the time this post is being written (early July) is happening now, in the spring and summer. Here, we have a video featuring the red-tailed hawk, as well as a brief appearance by a pooping Harris hawk (which unfortunately happens off screen)!
16. Besides the owls, only one other type of raptor is able to swivel one of it's toes to face backwards, so that it has two toes pointing forwards and two toes pointing backwards: the osprey! The osprey does this to allow for a more secure grip when catching fish, and the owls undoubtedly do it for much the same purpose when it comes to holding on to their prey.
An osprey, where you have a clear shot of its feet! Photo Credit: www.flickr.com
17. This particular prairie falcon has also survived a brush with West Nile Virus, just like the great horned owl! Anne was telling us that no one really but her would know it, but he far right tail feather on this bird has grown in weirdly ever since the birds dangerous brush with the virus. Here, we have a brief video where Anne talks a bit about this particular falcon's feather!
18. Just like dogs, birds don't sweat. Also just like dogs, birds will sometimes pant to help keep cool! Below, we have a video of the great-horned owl thermoregulating via something we like to call "gular fluttering!"
19. As you can see in this video below, the prairie falcon is being assisted in its thermoregulation by the presenter Anne, who is misting him with some water!
21. The two brown streaks under its eyes help keep some of the light from reflecting into its eyes, just like the black paint worn under the eyes by football and baseball players. Another fascinating example of convergent evolution at its finest!
22. A lot of the time when people think a hawk has gotten in and killed their chickens, its actually an owl.
A fox in the henhouse! I couldn't find a picture of a hawk in a henhouse, and besides, I really liked this picture. Photo Credit: www.hyscience.com
23. For reasons that Anne couldn’t fully explain, other than maybe panic or opportunity, often when an owl finds itself in a pigeon loft, the owl will only pull out and eat one or two of the pigeons, but it will pull off the heads of almost all of them, and leave them there. An interesting and gruesome way to end yet another fun-filled and fascinating 23-Fact Tuesday!
Make sure you check out the website for the Raptor Education Foundation by clicking HERE, and checking out the Facebook page for the Best Western Denver Southwest by clicking HERE!
