A Family of Red-Shouldered Hawks by Wes Deyton, Guest Blogger

A month or so ago, I came across a documentary on YouTube about a family of Red-Shouldered Hawks made by a man named Wes Deyton.  I also saw a number of really cool pictures that he took of the birds, and thought it might be interesting to see if he'd be willing to do a guest post!  Kindly, he was happy to oblige!  First, a bit about Mr. Deyton:

My name is Wes Deyton and I recently graduated from Western Carolina University with a Bachelors Degree in Communications and Broadcasting.  I live in Fuquay Varina North Carolina, which is near Raleigh.  I enjoy taking pictures and making videos of wildlife as well as scenic nature.

Anyways, let's all give Mr. Deyton a warm welcome!  I hope you enjoy these pictures and the video, all of which were taken by Mr. Deyton, as much as I did!

The Red Shouldered Hawks in the video (below) were filmed in the woods behind my house. I have been following them for about the whole Summer.  I did not get any footage of the hawks in the nest when they were really young, because I was still at WCU. I have not been able to find them lately because I think the young Hawks have gone on to find their own territory.

The Red Shouldered Hawk is a medium sized hawk, it primarily lives in woodland areas and it can be found all over the eastern woodlands as well as California and Northern Mexico. These birds generally live in woodland and swamp areas and build their nests high up in trees, close to sources of water such as lakes, streams and swamps.  The nesting period of these birds is about 45-60 days.  

The female hawk spends most of her time getting food to bring back to the nest for her young.  The diet of these birds consist mostly of small mammals, reptiles (including snakes), and amphibians.  There is no sharing in a hawks nest when it comes to food: when the mother brings food to the nest, the chicks have to fight for food.  Sometimes, the female hawk will feed the smaller hawk to make sure it gets enough nourishment to grow and develop healthily.  

Hawks get bored in the nest and dream about life on the outside. They dream about flying high like their parents. This is very evident by seeing them jump back and forth and flap their wings in the nest before they are fully developed to fly. The young hawks climb from branch to branch to develop their balance and then fly short distances until they build up their confidence to fly away from the nest.

The hawk is at the top of the food chain and strikes fear in smaller birds when they are around.

Aren't those pictures brilliant!  Thank you very much Mr. Deyton for sharing these pictures and the video with us, we hope to hear more from you again in the future!  Thanks again!  -Zack Neher

North Carolina Piedmont on Dwellable

Dinosaur Provincial Park

As we talked about IN A PREVIOUS POST, dinosaurs are pretty big in Canada.  A large number of dinosaur species have been discovered up there, and one of the best places to find dinosaurs is a place near Calgary in Alberta called Dinosaur Provincial Park.  As a matter of fact, Dinosaur Provincial Park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, along with 981 other properties "which the World Heritage Committee considers as having outstanding universal value."  Other famous sites include the Great Barrier Reef in Australia; the Galápagos Islands; Stonehenge; the Grand Canyon; and "Memphis and its Necropolis," the site of the Great Pyramids and the Great Sphinx of Giza!  Just to name a few.  Do you get the idea, though?  Dinosaur Provincial Park is kind of a big deal!

But why?  What makes a bunch of badlands with some dinosaur bones in them so important to Canada, much less a committee dedicated to protecting such international treasures as the Great Barrier Reef and the Great Pyramids?  What makes Dinosaur Provincial Park so GREAT?  (Get it?  Nevermind, it wasn't that funny anyways.)  Here's what the UNESCO website has to say about the park:

The property is unmatched in terms of the number and variety of high quality specimens, over 60 of which represent more than 45 genera and 14 families of dinosaurs, which date back 75-77 million years. The park contains exceptional riparian habitat features as well as "badlands" of outstanding aesthetic value.
The committee also included two main criterion that show why the park is so important:

Criterion (vii): Dinosaur Provincial Park is an outstanding example of major geological processes and fluvial erosion patterns in semi-arid steppes. These "badlands" stretch along 24 kilometers of high quality and virtually undisturbed riparian habitat, presenting a landscape of stark, but exceptional natural beauty.


Criterion (viii): The property is outstanding in the number and variety of high quality specimens representing every known group of Cretaceous dinosaurs. The diversity affords excellent opportunities for paleontology that is both comparative and chronological. Over 300 specimens from the Oldman Formation in the park including more than 150 complete skeletons now reside in more than 30 major museums.

Wow. Well that's a pretty big deal!  According to the website, between 1979 and 1991, a grand total of around 23,347 fossils were collected, including an amazing 300 dinosaur skeletons!  As mentioned above, the dinosaur skeletons represent every known group of Cretaceous dinosaurs.  (I assume that they mean every group that is known to live in North America at the time.)  Not only does the sheer amount of fossils allow for a more complete view of an extinct ecosystem, new dinosaurs and other animals have been discovered there, as well as potential behavior that can be inferred from the fossils! 

During the Late Cretaceous North America was divided by the Western Interior Seaway, a shallow, continental sea.  (To learn more about the seaway, check out a recent post I did on it by clicking HERE).  In Dinosaur Provincial Park, you can find the remains of both ocean going animals and land dwellers, as well!  The park is, of course, famous for its dinosaurs (as you could probably tell from its name).  But many of the marine creatures entombed in the rocks there and in the surrounding area are pretty awesome, as well!  For example, Hybodus, an interesting shark!  

Before we get to the dinosaurs, let's check out a few other cool creatures found in the park!  One of these is a creature we mentioned in a previous post: the post entitled "There Be Dragons," all about the monitor lizards!  In the post, I had a picture of a prehistoric monitor lizard named Palaeosaniwa attacking a flock of Ornithomimus.  Well, both of these creatures have been found in the park!  Below is the picture, created by talented paleo-artist James Field!  You can check out his website HERE!

Many animals have been discovered in the park, including turtles, crocodilians, and a ton of plants, but the only other non-dinosaur we are going to look at for now is a small little primitive marsupial mammal called Eodelphis!  Eodelphis, whose name means "early opossum," is thought to have weighed a little over a pound which, astonishingly, means that it was one of the largest mammals of its time!  It is thought to be related to Didelphodon, another Mesozoic marsupial mammal, who we shall meet in an upcoming post!

Now for the dinosaurs!  I'm going to start with an animal called Centrosaurus.  A ceratopsian dinosaur (just like Triceratops), thousands of individuals specimens of Centrosaurus have been discovered in a massive bonebed that extends for hundreds of meters!  While paleontologists disagree as to exactly what killed all of these animals, and in such immense numbers, the prevailing theory is that this was a herd of animals that drowned while trying to cross a river.  The individuals that make up the herd vary widely in age, which is one of the lines of evidence which supports the herd idea.  This is important evidence for paleontologists, as it indicates that these animals lived in groups!  

Another dinosaur that is found in the park is the small pachycephalosaur called Stegoceras, who is not to be confused with the similarly named and much more famous Stegosaurus!

Here is another fun dinosaur, called Chirostenotes!  This oviraptorosaur was first found in the park, and is definitely quite funky looking!

Dromaeosaurus, a distant cousin of Chirostenotes and a closer relative of the famous Velociraptor, was also first discovered in the park!

Just as Dromaeosaurus has been pushed from the limelight by Velociraptor, so too has Daspletosaurus been pushed by Tyrannosaurus!  Daspletosaurus is a tyrannosaur as well, and was first discovered in (surprise surprise) Dinosaur Provincial Park!  Two more Dinosaur Provinicial Park natives (and firsts) are Euoplocephalus, one of the tank-like ankylosaurs, and Parasaurolophus, a hadrosaur or duck-billed dinosaur!

I can't WAIT to visit the park one day!  In the meantime, HERE is a link to the park's website so you, too can plan your visit!

Calgary on Dwellable

Boulder Submerged: Not So Strange 70 Million Years Ago!

Where I live in Boulder, Colorado, we aren't used to having a whole lot of moisture.  For the last few days, however, we have been experiencing record breaking levels of rain: as a matter of fact, the sheer amount of rain that we are being inundated with has resulted in enormous levels of flooding, complete with evacuations, destroyed homes and roads, and unfortunately several deaths.  I am actually writing this Thursday evening after having my very first flood day, and we have a flood day tomorrow, too!  (And now I am finishing the post on Sunday and we are STILL getting rain!)  Despite the fact that all of this water in Boulder is quite unusual, if you were to travel back 70 to 100 million years ago right here in Boulder, water wouldn't be the exception: it would be the norm!

You see, 70 million years ago, there were no Rocky Mountains.  In fact, Colorado was nowhere near a mile high above sea level: it was about three hundred feet below!  Due to the fact that what would one day be Colorado was still located on continental crust, the Western Interior Seaway couldn't be super deep: nevertheless, three hundred feet deep was deep enough to contain an enormous assortment of fun creatures!  We've already met a large number of these creatures throughout different posts in the blog, but let's take another look at these guys, as well as other fun filled creatures of this ancient seaway!

Let's start on the shore: multiple dinosaur trackways throughout the nation (including two that I've been to, Dinosaur Ridge near Morrison and the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country) show that many different dinosaurs roamed the shore of the Western Interior, including large ornithopods and large theropods.  Some of these dinosaurs actually died and were swept out to shore, such as the ankylosaur Niobrarasaurus!

Pyg chilling inside of a cast of one of the large ornithopod footprints from Dinosaur Ridge at the Morrison Natural History Museum

They weren't the only dinosaurs that lived on the shore, though: meet the flightless, cormorant-like bird Hesperornis!  Originally discovered by famous paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh, Hesperornis grew to around six feet in length, and looks very similar to the Galápagos flightless cormorant via the process of convergent evolution!

Hesperornis probably ate a wide variety of fish, squid, and an interesting group of extinct marine vertebrates called ammonites.  Some ammonites could grow to simply ENORMOUS proportions, such as the one in the top left of the picture below, one from the Heritage Museum of the Texas Hill Country that I mentioned above.  Found all over the country (and, as a matter of fact, the world), one particular ammonite site looks like it might be a nesting site!  To learn more about this ammonite nesting site, click HERE to check out a guest post by paleontologist and physicist Wayne Itano!

Ammonites were by no means the largest creature in the Western Interior, however, and neither was Hesperornis.  As a matter of fact, neither of them were all that close at all!  Hesperornis was relatively close to the bottom of the food chain, a fact that we know conclusively due to the discovery of one particular specimen of an interesting animal called Tylosaurus in South Dakota.  Tylosaurus was a type of animal called a mosasaur, whose closest living relatives today are the monitor lizards (like the Komodo dragon and the Nile monitor).   Contained within the stomach cavity of this particular Tylosaurus specimen were the remains of a fish, a smaller related species of mosasaur, and a Hesperornis!  Platecarpus remains, one of those smaller mosasaurs, are sometimes found within the belly of the Tylosaurus, the belly of the beast!

Paleontologists are always very excited when they think they've found the fossilized remains of a predator with the remains of its prey still inside.  This can help establish a predator/prey relationship between the two creatures, a relationship that might otherwise have simply been theorized.  Fortunately for us paleontologists, multiple critters in the Western Interior Seaway have been discovered with other little critters within their stomach cavity!  One of these, which I have nicknamed "The Inception Fossil," we actually did a whole post about a few months back!  Entitled "Xiphactinus: The Inception Fossil," this post was all about a fish called Xiphactinus and why I called it "The Inception Fossil."  As you might have already guessed from the context, the nickname stems from the "fish within a fish" idea: Xiphactinus is often found with other fish inside of its stomach!  Below, you can see one of these Inception Fossils, where a Xiphactinus died shortly after swallowing a fish called Gillicus.

Xiphactinus and Gillicus were by no means the only fish in the sea!  The other day, my friend Sam Lippincott and I visited the Denver Gem and Mineral Show.  We both purchased several fossils there, and one of my purchases was a small tooth of another Western Interior Cretaceous Seaway (WIKS) fish called Enchodus.  The name of this fish roughly translates to "spear fish," and from the picture below, you can probably see why: this fish was definitely made to catch some other fish!  Fossils attributed to Enchodus have been found on either side of the K/T boundary, meaning that this fish seems to have survived the extinction that killed off the non avian dinosaurs, and many of the marine creatures as well!

It looks to me like this tooth may be one of the large protruding teeth on the upper part of the jaw.

Pyg checks out her new Enchodus tooth from the Denver Gem and Mineral Show!

I got another tooth from another fish that would have inhabited the Western Interior: this tooth belongs to the shark Squalicorax!  When fully grown, Squalicorax was around the size of the living great white shark, and would have prowled the oceans much like sharks do today.  As a matter of fact, sharks have survived relatively unchanged for hundreds of millions of years!

Pyg checks out the other tooth she purchased at the Denver Gem and Mineral Show, a Squalicorax tooth!

Next, we have a funky looking group of reptiles that look like nothing that we have on Earth today!  These are the plesiosaurs, and some of them could grow pretty large!  Remember before how we mentioned that Hesperornis was discovered by a guy named Marsh?  Well, Marsh had a paleontology rival named Cope.  This rivalry got kind of out of hand, and resulted in something that today we call "The Bone Wars."  (To learn more about the Bone Wars from the ridiculously funny "The Oatmeal," make sure to click the link HERE!)  One of the particularly famous instances in this paleontological skirmish was when Marsh's rival, Edward Drinker Cope, reconstructed one of these plesiosaurs.  Called Elasmosaurus, Cope accidentally placed the head of the animal on the tip of the tail instead of in its proper place at the end of the neck.  As you can imagine, Marsh took the opportunity to mock his rival.  This also sets up the perfect joke for The Oatmeal, but I won't spoil it for you: you have to check it out for yourself!

Although there were other plesiosaurs that swam through the ancient North American seas, my favorite is the funky looking Dolichorhynchops!  This type of short-necked plesiosaur has also been found in the stomach of the enormous Tylosaurus!

Dolichorhynchops is most definitely not a familiar face to your average Joe, but what about Archelon?  This massive sea turtle also inhabited the seaway, and is actually the largest sea turtle known to science!  This guy is about 13 feet long, which is about twice as long as the leatherback sea turtle, who are the largest living sea turtles!  And although Archelon looks similar to sea turtles today, it definitely doesn't look like the turtles we have in Boulder!

Just as the floodwaters are subsiding, so too did the Western Interior Seaway drain from the center of the North American continent.  As the Rocky Mountain started getting pushed up and the elevation got higher and higher, the shallow sea got shallower and shallower, until there was nothing left.  Nothing left, that is, except for the fossils that we find today!  And who knows, maybe the floodwaters from the recent storms have eroded away some overburden, revealing some prehistoric marine fossils beneath!

Introduction to Latin and Greek Roots and the Number One!

When it comes to giving an organism a scientific name, many languages can be used to construct the two part name (consisting of the genus name and the species name), but it must be in the Latin grammatical form.  For example: a long time ago, last July, I wrote a post about some fun scientific names: click HERE to check it out!  One of the animals that we talked about is an interesting theropod dinosaur from Madagascar.  Named Masiakasaurus knopfleri, this dinosaurs name roughly translates to "vicious lizard of Knopfler."  In this case, the "Knopfler" part of the name is the surname of famous musician Mark Knopfler, and the "Masiakasaurus" part of the name is the origin of the "vicious lizard" half.  So the words in the binomial name don't have to be Latin: however, they are Latinized.  Oftentimes, Greek roots are used.

Oftentimes, you can tell a bit about an animal just from its scientific name.  I like doing this, and thought it might make for a few good posts.  We'll start easy today: let's look at the number one, in both its cardinal (i.e. one, two, three, etc.) form, as well as its multiple form (i.e. once, twice, thrice, etc.).  Many of these roots will be familiar to you, both the Latin roots and the Greek roots.  For example, the root "du" in Latin means the English equivalent of two.  Meanwhile, the Greek root is "di."  For multiples (i.e. the English equivalent of the word "twice"), you would use the Latin root "bi" or the Greek root "dis."  There are often multiple roots that mean the same thing in any given language.  For example, when using the Greek root "di" to mean two, you could instead use "dy" or "duo."  Sometimes, especially for the multiple versions of the roots, there are just not really any animals whose scientific names use them: at least, not that I could easily find.  If you want to search those animals out, by all means be my guest!

Keep in mind, however, that just because a scientific name has the letters of the root in it, doesn't necessarily that the person who originally came up with that name meant that root to be inside.  For example, the dugong, Dugong dugon, appears to have the Latin root "du" in it.  However, the true etymology stems from the Malay name for the animal, "duyung," meaning "lady of the sea."  Another example is the massive extinct penguin Pachydyptes simpsoni.  A quick look at the species name, "simpsoni," might indicate that the Latin root "sim," meaning "once" in English, is in the name: however, this penguin was actually named for the famous paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson!

Much as Pachydyptes simpsoni would have dove into the oceans off the coast of Australia, let us in turn dive into the number one!  We will start with the cardinal roots for the two languages.  First, in Latin, the root word would be "uni."  You might be thinking of "unicycle" (one wheel), or "unicorn" (one horn).  Here is an example of a biological organism with the root "uni" in its binomial name: meet Monotropa uniflora, the ghost plant!  The name genus name, Monotropa, originates from the Greek roots "mono" and "trop," meaning "once" and "turning" respectively.  Meanwhile, the species name, uniflora, means "one" and "flowered" from the roots "uni" and "flora."  We'll talk about this flower again in a few minutes.

Next, we have the Greek root for "one," which is the root word "hen."  For this root, we will look at another fascinating creature we have about!  Remember the turtle-like placodonts that we talked about in a post a few months back?  (No?  Well you better familiarize yourself with it HERE because otherwise your friends will ostracize you.)  Of these placodonts, one of them received the binomial name "turtle-faced single tooth.)  Called Henodus chelyops, the genus name, Henodus, can be broken down into the Greek roots of "hen" and "odus."  As we already talked about, "hen" means "one," and the root "odus" is the Greek root for "tooth."  (We will probably have an entire blog post just about that one root!)

Wait a second, though let's back up to the ghost plant real fast, Monotropa uniflora.  In this binomial name, the root "uni" was only used once in the binomial name, and yet the English words "once" and "one" were both contained within!  Well, this is because the root "mono" is the multiple Greek root for one!  (Remember, multiple would be like once, twice, thrice, etc.)  Here are some other examples of the root word "mono" used in a biological context:

• One of the three main groups of mammals, the monotremes, get their name from the roots "mono" and "trema," which roughly translates to "single hole."  This refers to the cloaca, a single orifice in many animals that is the only opening for the reproductive, intestinal, and urinary tracts!
• The dubious taxa of ceratopsian dinosaur called Monoclonius, whose name means "single sprout," and refers to the single horn coming out of the snout of the animal!  The remains of Monoclonius are very fragmentary, however, and some paleontologists believe that Monoclonius is simply a bunch of juvenile ceratopsian dinosaurs clumped together, such as Centrosaurus.  

• The scientific name of the narwhal is Monodon monoceros, which is double ones!  The name means one-tooth (mono-don) one-horn (mono-ceros).  The root word "ceros" might sound familiar: remember the ceratopsians?  "Ceratopsian" translates to "horned faces" (cerat=horned, tops=face).  
• This is Monolophosaurus, a Chinese theropod from the Middle Jurassic   It's name, meaning "single-crested lizard," originates from the fact that the animals head plays host to a single large crest running much of the length of the skull!

• Now this little dinosaur is QUITE the interesting fellow: little Mononykus, one of the few dinosaurs whose arms are even stranger than those of Tyrannosaurus rex!  Literally meaning "one claw," Mononykus had a single claw on its arm, and was quite interesting looking!  This three foot long dinosaur was originally named Mononychus, but the name was changed after it was discovered that name was already taken by a beetle, the iris weevil!

We ain't done yet, though!  Remember before when I mentioned that multiple roots can have the same meaning?  Well, there are two multiple Greek roots that mean one, with "mono" being one and "haplo" being the other!  Here are a pair of examples:

• The sauropod called Mongolosaurus haplodon, whose genus name refers to Mongolia and whose species name, "haplodon," translates to "single tooth."  Mongolosaurus, like Monoclonius, is a dubious taxa.

• Here's another sauropod: Haplocanthosaurus, discovered in the Morrison Formation, along with the stegosaur Hesperosaurus, the theropod Allosaurus, and another sauropod called Eobrontosaurus!  However, "Haplocanthosaurus" roughly translates to "simple spined lizard."  This is another example of a root word that has two different meanings: "haplo" can either mean "single," or "simple," making binomial nomenclature anything but.

This is a lot to process for a single post, so I think we will save the twos for next time!

The New World Vultures: Top Ten Vultures (Part 2)

On Thursday, I published the first of our two-parter "Top Ten Vultures" 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