1.
Eurasian hoopoe
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The hoopoe /ˈhuːpuː/ is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers. It is the extant species in the family Upupidae. One insular species, the Saint Helena hoopoe, is extinct, Upupa and epops are respectively the Latin and Ancient Greek names for the hoopoe, both, like the English name, are onomatopoeic forms which imitate the cry of the bird. In Ancient Egypt the species was known under two names, the earliest most probably having been *db3. w and/or *db3. t) the one who blocks up <its nesthole>. Therefore also the early Eg. word db<3>. t meaning sundried brick was often written with the hoopoe-hieroglyph, here used as a phonogram. The youngest name -dating from New Kingdom to late demotic texts- was kkp. t, this name akin to Biblical Hebrew douchiphat, the hoopoe was classified in the clade Coraciiformes, which also includes kingfishers, bee-eaters, and rollers. A close relationship between the hoopoe and the woodhoopoes is also supported by the shared and unique nature of their stapes, in the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, the hoopoe is separated from the Coraciiformes as a separate order, the Upupiformes. Some authorities place the woodhoopoes in the Upupiformes as well, now the consensus is that both hoopoe and the wood hoopoes belowng with the hornbills in the Bucerotiformes. The fossil record of the hoopoes is very incomplete, with the earliest fossil coming from the Quaternary, the fossil record of their relatives is older, with fossil woodhoopoes dating back to the Miocene and those of an extinct related family, the Messelirrisoridae, dating from the Eocene. It is the only extant member of its family, although some consider some of the subspecies as separate species. Several authors have separated the Madagascan subspecies as a separate species, the morphological differences between the most commonly split subspecies, U. e. marginata, and the other subspecies are minor, and only U. e. marginata has distinctly different vocalisations. One accepted separate species, the Saint Helena hoopoe, U. antaios, lived on the island of St Helena but became extinct in the 16th century, the genus Upupa was created by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758. Nine subspecies of hoopoe are recognised by Kristin and they vary mostly in size and the depth of colour in the plumage. Two further subspecies have been proposed, U. e. minor in South Africa, the hoopoe is a medium-sized bird, 25–32 cm long, with a 44–48 cm wingspan. The species is distinctive, with a long, thin tapering bill that is black with a fawn base. The strengthened musculature of the head allows the bill to be opened when probing inside the soil, the hoopoe has broad and rounded wings capable of strong flight, these are larger in the northern migratory subspecies. The hoopoe has an undulating flight, which is like that of a giant butterfly. Adults may begin their moult after the season and continue after they have migrated for the winter
2.
Taxonomy (biology)
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Taxonomy is the science of defining groups of biological organisms on the basis of shared characteristics and giving names to those groups. The exact definition of taxonomy varies from source to source, but the core of the remains, the conception, naming. There is some disagreement as to whether biological nomenclature is considered a part of taxonomy, the broadest meaning of taxonomy is used here. The word taxonomy was introduced in 1813 by Candolle, in his Théorie élémentaire de la botanique, the term alpha taxonomy is primarily used today to refer to the discipline of finding, describing, and naming taxa, particularly species. In earlier literature, the term had a different meaning, referring to morphological taxonomy, ideals can, it may be said, never be completely realized. They have, however, a value of acting as permanent stimulants. Some of us please ourselves by thinking we are now groping in a beta taxonomy, turrill thus explicitly excludes from alpha taxonomy various areas of study that he includes within taxonomy as a whole, such as ecology, physiology, genetics, and cytology. He further excludes phylogenetic reconstruction from alpha taxonomy, thus, Ernst Mayr in 1968 defined beta taxonomy as the classification of ranks higher than species. This activity is what the term denotes, it is also referred to as beta taxonomy. How species should be defined in a group of organisms gives rise to practical and theoretical problems that are referred to as the species problem. The scientific work of deciding how to define species has been called microtaxonomy, by extension, macrotaxonomy is the study of groups at higher taxonomic ranks, from subgenus and above only, than species. While some descriptions of taxonomic history attempt to date taxonomy to ancient civilizations, earlier works were primarily descriptive, and focused on plants that were useful in agriculture or medicine. There are a number of stages in scientific thinking. Early taxonomy was based on criteria, the so-called artificial systems. Later came systems based on a complete consideration of the characteristics of taxa, referred to as natural systems, such as those of de Jussieu, de Candolle and Bentham. The publication of Charles Darwins Origin of Species led to new ways of thinking about classification based on evolutionary relationships and this was the concept of phyletic systems, from 1883 onwards. This approach was typified by those of Eichler and Engler, the advent of molecular genetics and statistical methodology allowed the creation of the modern era of phylogenetic systems based on cladistics, rather than morphology alone. Taxonomy has been called the worlds oldest profession, and naming and classifying our surroundings has likely been taking place as long as mankind has been able to communicate
3.
Animal
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Animals are multicellular, eukaryotic organisms of the kingdom Animalia. The animal kingdom emerged as a clade within Apoikozoa as the group to the choanoflagellates. Animals are motile, meaning they can move spontaneously and independently at some point in their lives and their body plan eventually becomes fixed as they develop, although some undergo a process of metamorphosis later in their lives. All animals are heterotrophs, they must ingest other organisms or their products for sustenance, most known animal phyla appeared in the fossil record as marine species during the Cambrian explosion, about 542 million years ago. Animals can be divided broadly into vertebrates and invertebrates, vertebrates have a backbone or spine, and amount to less than five percent of all described animal species. They include fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, the remaining animals are the invertebrates, which lack a backbone. These include molluscs, arthropods, annelids, nematodes, flatworms, cnidarians, ctenophores, the study of animals is called zoology. The word animal comes from the Latin animalis, meaning having breath, the biological definition of the word refers to all members of the kingdom Animalia, encompassing creatures as diverse as sponges, jellyfish, insects, and humans. Aristotle divided the world between animals and plants, and this was followed by Carl Linnaeus, in the first hierarchical classification. In Linnaeuss original scheme, the animals were one of three kingdoms, divided into the classes of Vermes, Insecta, Pisces, Amphibia, Aves, and Mammalia. Since then the last four have all been subsumed into a single phylum, in 1874, Ernst Haeckel divided the animal kingdom into two subkingdoms, Metazoa and Protozoa. The protozoa were later moved to the kingdom Protista, leaving only the metazoa, thus Metazoa is now considered a synonym of Animalia. Animals have several characteristics that set apart from other living things. Animals are eukaryotic and multicellular, which separates them from bacteria and they are heterotrophic, generally digesting food in an internal chamber, which separates them from plants and algae. They are also distinguished from plants, algae, and fungi by lacking cell walls. All animals are motile, if only at life stages. In most animals, embryos pass through a stage, which is a characteristic exclusive to animals. With a few exceptions, most notably the sponges and Placozoa and these include muscles, which are able to contract and control locomotion, and nerve tissues, which send and process signals
4.
Chordate
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Chordates are deuterostomes, as during the embryo development stage the anus forms before the mouth. They are also bilaterally symmetric coelomates, in the case of vertebrate chordates, the notochord is usually replaced by a vertebral column during development, and they may have body plans organized via segmentation. There are also additional extinct taxa, the Vertebrata are sometimes considered as a subgroup of the clade Craniata, consisting of chordates with a skull, the Craniata and Tunicata compose the clade Olfactores. Of the more than 65,000 living species of chordates, the worlds largest and fastest animals, the blue whale and peregrine falcon respectively, are chordates, as are humans. Fossil chordates are known from at least as early as the Cambrian explosion, Hemichordata, which includes the acorn worms, has been presented as a fourth chordate subphylum, but it now is usually treated as a separate phylum. The Hemichordata, along with the Echinodermata, form the Ambulacraria, the Chordata and Ambulacraria form the superphylum Deuterostomia, composed of the deuterostomes. Attempts to work out the relationships of the chordates have produced several hypotheses. All of the earliest chordate fossils have found in the Early Cambrian Chengjiang fauna. Because the fossil record of early chordates is poor, only molecular phylogenetics offers a prospect of dating their emergence. However, the use of molecular phylogenetics for dating evolutionary transitions is controversial and it has also proved difficult to produce a detailed classification within the living chordates. Attempts to produce family trees shows that many of the traditional classes are paraphyletic. While this has been known since the 19th century, an insistence on only monophyletic taxa has resulted in vertebrate classification being in a state of flux. Although the name Chordata is attributed to William Bateson, it was already in prevalent use by 1880, ernst Haeckel described a taxon comprising tunicates, cephalochordates, and vertebrates in 1866. Though he used the German vernacular form, it is allowed under the ICZN code because of its subsequent latinization, among the vertebrate sub-group of chordates the notochord develops into the spine, and in wholly aquatic species this helps the animal to swim by flexing its tail. In fish and other vertebrates, this develops into the spinal cord, the pharynx is the part of the throat immediately behind the mouth. In fish, the slits are modified to form gills, a muscular tail that extends backwards behind the anus. This is a groove in the wall of the pharynx. In filter-feeding species it produces mucus to gather food particles, which helps in transporting food to the esophagus and it also stores iodine, and may be a precursor of the vertebrate thyroid gland
5.
Bird
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Birds, a subgroup of Reptiles, are the last living examples of Dinosaurs. Birds live worldwide and range in size from the 5 cm bee hummingbird to the 2.75 m ostrich. They rank as the class of tetrapods with the most living species, at ten thousand. Birds are the closest living relatives of crocodilians, the fossil record indicates that birds evolved from feathered ancestors within the theropod group of saurischian dinosaurs. True birds first appeared during the Cretaceous period, around 100 million years ago, Birds, especially those in the southern continents, survived this event and then migrated to other parts of the world while diversifying during periods of global cooling. Primitive bird-like dinosaurs that lie outside class Aves proper, in the broader group Avialae, have been found dating back to the mid-Jurassic period, around 170 million years ago. Birds have wings which are more or less developed depending on the species, the digestive and respiratory systems of birds are also uniquely adapted for flight. Some bird species of aquatic environments, particularly seabirds and some waterbirds, have evolved for swimming. Many species annually migrate great distances, Birds are social, communicating with visual signals, calls, and bird songs, and participating in such social behaviours as cooperative breeding and hunting, flocking, and mobbing of predators. The vast majority of species are socially monogamous, usually for one breeding season at a time, sometimes for years. Other species have breeding systems that are polygynous or, rarely, Birds produce offspring by laying eggs which are fertilised through sexual reproduction. They are usually laid in a nest and incubated by the parents, most birds have an extended period of parental care after hatching. Some birds, such as hens, lay eggs even when not fertilised, songbirds, parrots, and other species are popular as pets. Guano is harvested for use as a fertiliser, Birds prominently figure throughout human culture. About 120–130 species have become extinct due to human activity since the 17th century, human activity threatens about 1,200 bird species with extinction, though efforts are underway to protect them. Recreational birdwatching is an important part of the ecotourism industry, the first classification of birds was developed by Francis Willughby and John Ray in their 1676 volume Ornithologiae. Carl Linnaeus modified that work in 1758 to devise the taxonomic classification system currently in use, Birds are categorised as the biological class Aves in Linnaean taxonomy. Phylogenetic taxonomy places Aves in the dinosaur clade Theropoda, Aves and a sister group, the clade Crocodilia, contain the only living representatives of the reptile clade Archosauria
6.
Bucerotiformes
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Bucerotiformes is an order that contains the hornbills, hoopoe and wood hoopoes. Sometimes classified as members of Coraciiformes although increasing amount of evidence seem to support these birds being distinctive enough to warrant their own order, recent genetic data show that ground hornbills and Bycanistes form a clade outside the rest of the hornbill lineage. They are thought to represent an early African lineage, while the rest of Bucerotiformes evolved in Asia, the hoopoe subspecies Saint Helena hoopoe and the Madagascar subspecies are sometimes elevated to a full species. The two wood hoopoe genera, Phoeniculus and Rhinopomastus, appear to have diverged about 10 million years ago, so some systematists treat them as separate subfamilies or even separate families
7.
William Elford Leach
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William Elford Leach, MD, FRS was an English zoologist and marine biologist. Elford Leach was born at Hoe Gate, Plymouth, the son of an attorney, at the age of twelve he began a medical apprenticeship at the Devonshire and Exeter Hospital, studying anatomy and chemistry. By this time he was already collecting marine animals from Plymouth Sound, at seventeen he began studying medicine at St Bartholomews Hospital in London, finishing his training at the University of Edinburgh before graduating MD from the University of St Andrews. Here he threw himself into the task of reorganising and modernising these collections, in 1815, he published the first bibliography of entomology in Brewsters Edinburgh Encyclopedia. He also worked and published on other invertebrates, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and was the naturalist who separated the centipedes and millipedes from the insects, giving them their own group, the Myriapoda. In his day he was the leading expert on the Crustacea and was in contact with scientists in the United States. In 1816 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of 25, however, in 1821 he suffered a nervous breakdown due to overwork and became unable to continue his researches. He resigned from the museum in March 1822 and his elder sister Jane took him to continental Europe to convalesce and they lived in Italy and Malta and he died from cholera in San Sebastiano Curone, near Tortona, north of Genoa on 25 August 1836. He was one of the most laborious and successful, as well as one of the most universal, in Britain zoologists remained committed to the system of animal classification introduced by Linnaeus in the middle of the 18th century. This was a tool but its principles led to artificial groupings of species when creating larger groups such as genera. For example, Linnaeus had called all animals encased in an outer skeleton. The grouping does separate animals with hard outer skeletons from jellyfish, worms, snails, vertebrates, etc. in continental Europe in the late 18th century naturalists began to revise the way they grouped species. They used an array of characters, not just one or two, and began to discern groups of species that physically resembled one another, lived in similar ways. They created new genera to house these coherent groups and referred to these as natural genera and they named this approach the natural method or natural system of classification. Unlike many of his countrymen, Leach was aware of developments across the English Channel. He read the French literature and, despite the war with France and he applied the new principles to his own research and brought them to the attention of other British zoologists through his publications. Between the years 1813 and 1830 he produced more than 130 scientific articles, by applying the natural method in these works he created more than 380 new genera, many of which have stood the test of time and remain valid today. In 1834, at the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Leonard Jenyns reported on The Recent Progress
8.
Carl Linnaeus
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Carl Linnaeus, also known after his ennoblement as Carl von Linné, was a Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist, who formalised the modern system of naming organisms called binomial nomenclature. He is known by the father of modern taxonomy. Many of his writings were in Latin, and his name is rendered in Latin as Carolus Linnæus, Linnaeus was born in the countryside of Småland, in southern Sweden. He received most of his education at Uppsala University. He lived abroad between 1735 and 1738, where he studied and also published a first edition of his Systema Naturae in the Netherlands and he then returned to Sweden, where he became professor of medicine and botany at Uppsala. In the 1740s, he was sent on journeys through Sweden to find and classify plants. In the 1750s and 1760s, he continued to collect and classify animals, plants, and minerals, at the time of his death, he was one of the most acclaimed scientists in Europe. The philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau sent him the message, Tell him I know no man on earth. The German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote, With the exception of Shakespeare and Spinoza, Swedish author August Strindberg wrote, Linnaeus was in reality a poet who happened to become a naturalist. Among other compliments, Linnaeus has been called Princeps botanicorum, The Pliny of the North and he is also considered as one of the founders of modern ecology. In botany, the abbreviation used to indicate Linnaeus as the authority for species names is L. In older publications, sometimes the abbreviation Linn. is found, Linnæus was born in the village of Råshult in Småland, Sweden, on 23 May 1707. He was the first child of Nicolaus Ingemarsson and Christina Brodersonia and his siblings were Anna Maria Linnæa, Sofia Juliana Linnæa, Samuel Linnæus, and Emerentia Linnæa. One of a line of peasants and priests, Nils was an amateur botanist, a Lutheran minister. Christina was the daughter of the rector of Stenbrohult, Samuel Brodersonius, a year after Linnæus birth, his grandfather Samuel Brodersonius died, and his father Nils became the rector of Stenbrohult. The family moved into the rectory from the curates house, even in his early years, Linnæus seemed to have a liking for plants, flowers in particular. Whenever he was upset, he was given a flower, which calmed him. Nils spent much time in his garden and often showed flowers to Linnaeus, soon Linnæus was given his own patch of earth where he could grow plants
9.
10th edition of Systema Naturae
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The 10th edition of Systema Naturae is a book written by Carl Linnaeus and published in two volumes in 1758 and 1759, which marks the starting point of zoological nomenclature. In it, Linnaeus introduced binomial nomenclature for animals, something he had already done for plants in his 1753 publication of Species Plantarum, before 1758, most biological catalogues had used polynomial names for the taxa included, including earlier editions of Systema Naturae. The first work to consistently apply binomial nomenclature across the kingdom was the 10th edition of Systema Naturae. Names published before that date are unavailable, even if they would otherwise satisfy the rules, during Linnaeus lifetime, Systema Naturae was under continuous revision. The Animal Kingdom, Animals enjoy sensation by means of an organization, animated by a medullary substance, perception by nerves. They have members for the different purposes of life, organs for their different senses and they all originate from an egg. Their external and internal structure, their anatomy, habits, instincts. The list has been broken down into the six classes Linnaeus described for animals, Mammalia, Aves, Amphibia, Pisces, Insecta. These classes were created by studying the internal anatomy, as seen in his key. Warm, red blood Viviparous, Mammalia Oviparous, Aves Heart with 1 auricle,1 ventricle, cold, red blood Lungs voluntary, Amphibia External gills, Pisces Heart with 1 auricle,0 ventricles. Linnaeus described mammals as, Animals that suckle their young by means of lactiferous teats, in external and internal structure they resemble man, most of them are quadrupeds, and with man, their natural enemy, inhabit the surface of the Earth. The largest, though fewest in number, inhabit the ocean and they are areal, vocal, swift and light, and destitute of external ears, lips, teeth, scrotum, womb, bladder, epiglottis, corpus callosum and its arch, and diaphragm. They breathe by means of gills, which are united by a bony arch, swim by means of radiate fins. Many of them are without a head, and most of them without feet. They are principally distinguished by their tentacles, by the Ancients they were not improperly called imperfect animals, as being destitute of ears, nose, head, eyes and legs, and are therefore totally distinct from Insects. In addition to repeating the species he had listed in his Species Plantarum. The species from Species Plantarum were numbered sequentially, while the new species were labelled with letters, new plant species described in the 10th edition of Systema Naturae include, The original 1758 Systema Naturae Linnaeus 1758 Classification of Animals on the Taxonomicon
10.
Upupa africana
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The hoopoe /ˈhuːpuː/ is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers. Three living and one species are recognized, though for many years all were lumped as a single species—Upupa epops. Upupa and epops are respectively the Latin and Ancient Greek names for the hoopoe, in Ancient Egypt the species was known under two names. The earliest most probably having been *db3. w and/or *db3. t) the one who blocks up <its nesthole>, therefore also the early Eg. word db<3>. t meaning sundried brick was often written with the hoopoe-hieroglyph, here used as a phonogram. The youngest name -dating from New Kingdom to late demotic texts- was kkp. t, this name akin to Biblical Hebrew douchiphat, the hoopoe was classified in the clade Coraciiformes, which also includes kingfishers, bee-eaters, and rollers. A close relationship between the hoopoe and the woodhoopoes is also supported by the shared and unique nature of their stapes, in the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, the hoopoe is separated from the Coraciiformes as a separate order, the Upupiformes. Some authorities place the woodhoopoes in the Upupiformes as well, now the consensus is that both hoopoe and the wood hoopoes belowng with the hornbills in the Bucerotiformes. The fossil record of the hoopoes is very incomplete, with the earliest fossil coming from the Quaternary, the fossil record of their relatives is older, with fossil woodhoopoes dating back to the Miocene and those of an extinct related family, the Messelirrisoridae, dating from the Eocene. Formerly considered a species, the hoopoe has been split into three separate species, the Madagascan hoopoe as a separate species, and the resident African hoopoe U. africana. The morphological differences between the most commonly split subspecies, U. e. marginata, and the subspecies are minor. One accepted separate species, the Saint Helena hoopoe, U. antaios, lived on the island of St Helena but became extinct in the 16th century, the genus Upupa was created by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758. Hoopoes are widespread in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, most European and north Asian birds migrate to the tropics in winter. In contrast, the African populations are all year. The species has been a vagrant in Alaska, U. e. saturata was recorded there in 1975 in the Yukon Delta. The hoopoe has two basic requirements of its habitat, bare or lightly vegetated ground on which to forage, the Madagascar subspecies also makes use of more dense primary forest. Hunting is of concern in southern Europe and Asia, hoopoes make seasonal movements in response to rain in some regions such as in Ceylon and in the Western Ghats. Birds have been seen at high altitudes during migration across the Himalayas, one was recorded at about 6,400 m by the first Mount Everest expedition. They also enjoy taking dust and sand baths, the diet of the hoopoe is mostly composed of insects, although small reptiles, frogs and plant matter such as seeds and berries are sometimes taken as well
11.
Saint Helena hoopoe
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The Saint Helena hoopoe, also known as the Saint Helena giant hoopoe or giant hoopoe, is an extinct species of the hoopoe, known exclusively from an incomplete subfossil skeleton. It was endemic to the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic and it was much larger than its European and African relatives, and was completely flightless. The incomplete skeleton, which was found in 1975 by the palaeontologist Storrs L. Olson, paleornithology of St Helena Island, south Atlantic Ocean
12.
Upupa epops
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The hoopoe /ˈhuːpuː/ is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers. Three living and one species are recognized, though for many years all were lumped as a single species—Upupa epops. Upupa and epops are respectively the Latin and Ancient Greek names for the hoopoe, in Ancient Egypt the species was known under two names. The earliest most probably having been *db3. w and/or *db3. t) the one who blocks up <its nesthole>, therefore also the early Eg. word db<3>. t meaning sundried brick was often written with the hoopoe-hieroglyph, here used as a phonogram. The youngest name -dating from New Kingdom to late demotic texts- was kkp. t, this name akin to Biblical Hebrew douchiphat, the hoopoe was classified in the clade Coraciiformes, which also includes kingfishers, bee-eaters, and rollers. A close relationship between the hoopoe and the woodhoopoes is also supported by the shared and unique nature of their stapes, in the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, the hoopoe is separated from the Coraciiformes as a separate order, the Upupiformes. Some authorities place the woodhoopoes in the Upupiformes as well, now the consensus is that both hoopoe and the wood hoopoes belowng with the hornbills in the Bucerotiformes. The fossil record of the hoopoes is very incomplete, with the earliest fossil coming from the Quaternary, the fossil record of their relatives is older, with fossil woodhoopoes dating back to the Miocene and those of an extinct related family, the Messelirrisoridae, dating from the Eocene. Formerly considered a species, the hoopoe has been split into three separate species, the Madagascan hoopoe as a separate species, and the resident African hoopoe U. africana. The morphological differences between the most commonly split subspecies, U. e. marginata, and the subspecies are minor. One accepted separate species, the Saint Helena hoopoe, U. antaios, lived on the island of St Helena but became extinct in the 16th century, the genus Upupa was created by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758. Hoopoes are widespread in Europe, Asia, and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, most European and north Asian birds migrate to the tropics in winter. In contrast, the African populations are all year. The species has been a vagrant in Alaska, U. e. saturata was recorded there in 1975 in the Yukon Delta. The hoopoe has two basic requirements of its habitat, bare or lightly vegetated ground on which to forage, the Madagascar subspecies also makes use of more dense primary forest. Hunting is of concern in southern Europe and Asia, hoopoes make seasonal movements in response to rain in some regions such as in Ceylon and in the Western Ghats. Birds have been seen at high altitudes during migration across the Himalayas, one was recorded at about 6,400 m by the first Mount Everest expedition. They also enjoy taking dust and sand baths, the diet of the hoopoe is mostly composed of insects, although small reptiles, frogs and plant matter such as seeds and berries are sometimes taken as well
13.
Madagascan hoopoe
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The Madagascan hoopoe is a subspecies of hoopoe in the Upupidae family. It is often considered as a species, separate from the hoopoe, due to its vocalisations and small differences in plumage. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical dry forests,2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
14.
Afro-Eurasia
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Afro-Eurasia, Afroeurasia, or Eurafrasia, nicknamed the World Island, is the combination of Africa and Eurasia which together form the largest contiguous landmass on Earth. The term is a portmanteau of the names of its constituent parts, Afro-Eurasia encompasses 84,980,532 square kilometers, a little over half the worlds land area, and has a population of approximately 6 billion people, roughly 86% of the world population. The Old World, a term from the Age of Discovery which, for European explorers, the World Island, a term coined by H. J. Mackinder and used in geopolitical contexts. Mackinder defines the World Island as the contiguous landmass, technically excluding islands such as Britain. Afro-Eurasia generally includes those islands usually considered part of Africa, Europe, although Afro-Eurasia is typically considered to comprise two or three separate continents, it is not a proper supercontinent. Instead, it is the largest present part of the supercontinent cycle and it has made up parts of every supercontinent since. This impacted southern Asia around 50 million years ago and began the formation of the Himalayas. The Arabian Plate broke off of Africa around 30 million years ago, after this initial connection of Afro-Eurasia, the Betic corridor along the Gibraltar Arc closed a little less than 6 million years ago, fusing Northwest Africa and Iberia together. This led to the nearly complete desiccation of the Mediterranean Basin, today, Africa is now joined to Asia only by a narrow land bridge and remains separated from Europe by the Straits of Gibraltar and Sicily. Paleogeologist Ronald Blakey has described the next 15 to 100 million years of development as fairly settled. In that time, Africa is expected to continue drifting northward and it will close the Strait of Gibraltar around 600,000 years from now, closing and quickly evaporating the Mediterranean Sea. No supercontinent will form within the time frame, however. Three possibilities are known as Novopangaea, Amasia, and Pangaea Ultima, normally Afro-Eurasia is divided at the Suez Canal into Africa and Eurasia, the latter of which can be subdivided into Europe and Asia. It has also divided into Eurasia-North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa for cultural and historical reasons. ² According to the International Date Line, Geography of Africa Geography of Asia Extreme points of Africa Extreme points of Europe Extreme points of Asia Extreme points of Eurasia Extreme points of Earth Intermediate Region
15.
Latin
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Latin is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. The Latin alphabet is derived from the Etruscan and Greek alphabets, Latin was originally spoken in Latium, in the Italian Peninsula. Through the power of the Roman Republic, it became the dominant language, Vulgar Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Romanian. Latin, Italian and French have contributed many words to the English language, Latin and Ancient Greek roots are used in theology, biology, and medicine. By the late Roman Republic, Old Latin had been standardised into Classical Latin, Vulgar Latin was the colloquial form spoken during the same time and attested in inscriptions and the works of comic playwrights like Plautus and Terence. Late Latin is the language from the 3rd century. Later, Early Modern Latin and Modern Latin evolved, Latin was used as the language of international communication, scholarship, and science until well into the 18th century, when it began to be supplanted by vernaculars. Ecclesiastical Latin remains the language of the Holy See and the Roman Rite of the Catholic Church. Today, many students, scholars and members of the Catholic clergy speak Latin fluently and it is taught in primary, secondary and postsecondary educational institutions around the world. The language has been passed down through various forms, some inscriptions have been published in an internationally agreed, monumental, multivolume series, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum. Authors and publishers vary, but the format is about the same, volumes detailing inscriptions with a critical apparatus stating the provenance, the reading and interpretation of these inscriptions is the subject matter of the field of epigraphy. The works of several hundred ancient authors who wrote in Latin have survived in whole or in part and they are in part the subject matter of the field of classics. The Cat in the Hat, and a book of fairy tales, additional resources include phrasebooks and resources for rendering everyday phrases and concepts into Latin, such as Meissners Latin Phrasebook. The Latin influence in English has been significant at all stages of its insular development. From the 16th to the 18th centuries, English writers cobbled together huge numbers of new words from Latin and Greek words, dubbed inkhorn terms, as if they had spilled from a pot of ink. Many of these words were used once by the author and then forgotten, many of the most common polysyllabic English words are of Latin origin through the medium of Old French. Romance words make respectively 59%, 20% and 14% of English, German and those figures can rise dramatically when only non-compound and non-derived words are included. Accordingly, Romance words make roughly 35% of the vocabulary of Dutch, Roman engineering had the same effect on scientific terminology as a whole
16.
Ancient Greek
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Ancient Greek includes the forms of Greek used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around the 9th century BC to the 6th century AD. It is often divided into the Archaic period, Classical period. It is antedated in the second millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek, the language of the Hellenistic phase is known as Koine. Koine is regarded as a historical stage of its own, although in its earliest form it closely resembled Attic Greek. Prior to the Koine period, Greek of the classic and earlier periods included several regional dialects, Ancient Greek was the language of Homer and of fifth-century Athenian historians, playwrights, and philosophers. It has contributed many words to English vocabulary and has been a subject of study in educational institutions of the Western world since the Renaissance. This article primarily contains information about the Epic and Classical phases of the language, Ancient Greek was a pluricentric language, divided into many dialects. The main dialect groups are Attic and Ionic, Aeolic, Arcadocypriot, some dialects are found in standardized literary forms used in literature, while others are attested only in inscriptions. There are also several historical forms, homeric Greek is a literary form of Archaic Greek used in the epic poems, the Iliad and Odyssey, and in later poems by other authors. Homeric Greek had significant differences in grammar and pronunciation from Classical Attic, the origins, early form and development of the Hellenic language family are not well understood because of a lack of contemporaneous evidence. Several theories exist about what Hellenic dialect groups may have existed between the divergence of early Greek-like speech from the common Proto-Indo-European language and the Classical period and they have the same general outline, but differ in some of the detail. The invasion would not be Dorian unless the invaders had some relationship to the historical Dorians. The invasion is known to have displaced population to the later Attic-Ionic regions, the Greeks of this period believed there were three major divisions of all Greek people—Dorians, Aeolians, and Ionians, each with their own defining and distinctive dialects. Often non-west is called East Greek, Arcadocypriot apparently descended more closely from the Mycenaean Greek of the Bronze Age. Boeotian had come under a strong Northwest Greek influence, and can in some respects be considered a transitional dialect, thessalian likewise had come under Northwest Greek influence, though to a lesser degree. Most of the dialect sub-groups listed above had further subdivisions, generally equivalent to a city-state and its surrounding territory, Doric notably had several intermediate divisions as well, into Island Doric, Southern Peloponnesus Doric, and Northern Peloponnesus Doric. The Lesbian dialect was Aeolic Greek and this dialect slowly replaced most of the older dialects, although Doric dialect has survived in the Tsakonian language, which is spoken in the region of modern Sparta. Doric has also passed down its aorist terminations into most verbs of Demotic Greek, by about the 6th century AD, the Koine had slowly metamorphosized into Medieval Greek
17.
Onomatopoeia
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An onomatopoeia is a word that phonetically imitates, resembles or suggests the sound that it describes. As an uncountable noun, onomatopoeia refers to the property of such words, common occurrences of onomatopoeias include animal noises such as oink, miaow, roar or chirp. Although in the English language, the term means the imitation of a sound. For words that imitate sounds, the term Ηχομιμητικό is used, Ηχομιμητικό derives from Ηχώ, meaning echo or sound, and μιμητικό, meaning mimetic or imitation. Some other very common English-language examples include hiccup, zoom, bang, beep, moo, machines and their sounds are also often described with onomatopoeia, as in honk or beep-beep for the horn of an automobile, and vroom or brum for the engine. When someone speaks of an involving a audible arcing of electricity. Human sounds sometimes provide instances of onomatopoeia, as when mwah is used to represent a kiss, for animal sounds, words like quack, moo, bark or woof, roar, meow/miaow or purr, cluck and baa are typically used in English. Some of these words are used both as nouns and as verbs, some languages flexibly integrate onomatopoeic words into their structure. This may evolve into a new word, up to the point that it is no longer recognized as onomatopoeia, verba dicendi are a method of integrating onomatopoeia and ideophones into grammar. Sometimes things are named from the sounds they make, in English, for example, there is the universal fastener which is named for the onomatopoeic of the sound it makes, the zip or zipper. In Tamil and Malayalam, the word for crow is kaakaa and this practice is especially common in certain languages such as Māori and, therefore, in names of animals borrowed from these languages. Although a particular sound is heard similarly by people of different cultures, for example, the snip of a pair of scissors is cri-cri in Italian, riqui-riqui in Spanish, terre-terre or treque-treque in Portuguese, krits-krits in modern Greek and katr-katr in Hindi. Similarly, the honk of a horn is ba-ba in Mandarin, tut-tut in French, pu-pu in Japanese, bbang-bbang in Korean, bært-bært in Norwegian, fom-fom in Portuguese. Onomatopoeic effect can also be produced in a phrase or word string with the help of alliteration and consonance alone, the most famous example is the phrase furrow followed free in Samuel Taylor Coleridges The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It may be noted that the words followed and free are not onomatopoeic in themselves, similarly, alliteration has been used in the line as the surf surged up the sun swept shore. To recreate the sound of breaking waves, in the poem I, She, comic strips and comic books made extensive use of onomatopoeia. Crane had fun with this, tossing in an occasional ker-splash or lickety-wop along with what would become the standard effects. Words as well as images became vehicles for carrying along his increasingly fast-paced storylines, in 2002, DC Comics introduced a villain named Onomatopoeia, an athlete, martial artist and weapons expert who often speaks sounds
18.
Clade
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A clade is a group of organisms that consists of a common ancestor and all its lineal descendants, and represents a single branch on the tree of life. The common ancestor may be an individual, a population, a species, clades are nested, one in another, as each branch in turn splits into smaller branches. These splits reflect evolutionary history as populations diverged and evolved independently, over the last few decades, the cladistic approach has revolutionized biological classification and revealed surprising evolutionary relationships among organisms. Increasingly, taxonomists try to avoid naming taxa that are not clades, the term clade was coined in 1957 by the biologist Julian Huxley to refer to the result of cladogenesis, a concept Huxley borrowed from Bernhard Rensch. Many commonly named groups are clades, for example, rodents or insects, because in each case, their name refers to a common ancestor with all its descendant branches. Rodents, for example, are a branch of mammals that split off after the end of the period when the clade Dinosauria stopped being the dominant terrestrial vertebrates 66 million years ago, the original population and all its descendants are a clade. The rodent clade corresponds to the order Rodentia, and insects to the class Insecta and these clades include smaller clades, such as chipmunk or ant, each of which consists of even smaller clades. The clade rodent is in included in the mammal, vertebrate. The phenomenon of convergent evolution is, however, responsible for cases where there are misleading similarities in the morphology of groups that evolved from different lineages. The publication of Darwins theory of evolution in 1859 gave this view increasing weight, thomas Henry Huxley, an early advocate of evolutionary theory, proposed a revised taxonomy based on clades. For example, he grouped birds with reptiles, based on fossil evidence, german biologist Emil Hans Willi Hennig is considered to be the founder of cladistics. Taxonomists have increasingly worked to make the taxonomic system reflect evolution, when it comes to naming, however, this principle is not always compatible with the traditional rank-based nomenclature. For these and other reasons, phylogenetic nomenclature has been developed, a clade is by definition monophyletic, meaning that it contains one ancestor and all its descendants. The ancestor can be known or unknown, any and all members of a clade can be extant or extinct, the science that tries to reconstruct phylogenetic trees and thus discover clades is called phylogenetics or cladistics, the latter term coined by Ernst Mayr, derived from clade. The results of analyses are tree-shaped diagrams called cladograms, they. Three methods of defining clades are featured in phylogenetic nomenclature, node-, stem-, the relationship between clades can be described in several ways, A clade located within a clade is said to be nested within that clade. In the diagram, the clade, i. e. the apes. Two clades are sisters if they have a common ancestor
19.
Coraciiformes
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The Coraciiformes are a group of usually colorful birds including the kingfishers, the bee-eaters, the rollers, the motmots, and the todies. They generally have syndactyly, with three forward-pointing toes, though in many one of these is missing. This is largely an Old World order, with the representation in the New World limited to the dozen or so species of todies and motmots, the name Coraciiformes means raven-like, which is a misnomer. Specifically, it comes from the Latin language corax, meaning raven and Latin forma, meaning form and this order has been seen to be something of a mixed assortment, and the Coraciiformes may be considered as including only the rollers. All the other families would then be considered to represent lineages of birds related to Coraciiformes. This seems to be oversplitting, as most Coraciiformes indeed form a reasonably robust clade, the cuckoo rollers true affinities appear to lie elsewhere. The trogons and hornbills are either very basal lineages, or might be considered distinct own orders, the entire group and the Piciformes are closely related to the Passeriformes. Several extinct coraciiform families are known from Paleogene fossils. They probably belong to the group and are sometimes difficult to assign because they were even closer still to the Piciformes. In addition, there are prehistoric genera which are likewise difficult to place into a family. At least the Eocoraciidae are very basal, but the Late Eocene Geranopteridae form a superfamily Coracioidea with the extant rollers and ground-rollers already, a few prehistoric taxa of the present-day families have been described, see the family articles for details. Unresolved Genus Quasisyndactylus - alcediniform, basal, Family Primobucconidae, including Primobucco and Septencoracias Coraciiformes gen. et spp. indet. PQ1216, QU15640 Genus Protornis – basal to motmotids and meropids, a recent study suggest that the following families may belong to a separate order called Bucerotiformes. The results still in dispute though, Family Bucorvidae Family Bucerotidae Family Upupidae Family Phoeniculidae The Leptosomatidae probably do not belong here. The trogons are sometimes placed here as a family Trogonidae, the Late Eocene Palaeospizidae are sometimes also placed in the Coraciiformes, as are the Early to Middle Eocene Primobucconidae and the Middle Eocene to Early Oligocene Sylphornithidae. The Primobucconidae at least indeed seem to belong here, molecular support for a sister group relationship between Pici and Galbulae. Doi,10. 1034/j. 1600-048X.2003.03103. x PDF fulltext Mayr, Gerald & Mourer-Chauviré, Cécile, Rollers from the Middle Eocene of Messel, DOI,10. 1671/0272-46340202.0. CO,2 PDF fulltext Terres, John K. The Audubon Society Encyclopedia of North American Birds, ISBN 0-394-46651-9 Order Coraciiformes - Biodiversity Overview, Untamed Science Tree of Life, Coraciiformes
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Kingfisher
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Kingfishers are a group of small to medium-sized, brightly colored birds in the order Coraciiformes. They have a distribution, with most species found outside of the Americas. The group is treated either as a family, the Alcedinidae. Roughly 90 species of kingfishers are described, all have large heads, long, sharp, pointed bills, short legs, and stubby tails. Most species have bright plumage with few differences between the sexes, most species are tropical in distribution, and a slight majority are found only in forests. They consume a range of prey, as well as fish. While kingfishers are usually thought to live near rivers and eat fish, most species live away from water, like other members of their order, they nest in cavities, usually tunnels dug into the natural or artificial banks in the ground. A quarter of all kingfishers nest in abandoned termite nests, a few species, principally insular forms, are threatened with extinction. In Britain, the word normally refers to the common kingfisher. The family Alcedinidae was introduced by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815, the taxonomy of the three families is complex and rather controversial. Although commonly assigned to the order Coraciiformes, from this level down confusion sets in and that move was supported by chromosome and DNA–DNA hybridisation studies, but challenged on the grounds that all three groups are monophyletic with respect to the other Coraciiformes. This leads to them being grouped as the suborder Alcedines, the tree kingfishers have been previously given the familial name Dacelonidae, but Halcyonidae has priority. The centre of diversity is the Australasian region, but the group is not thought to have originated there. Instead, they evolved in the Northern Hemisphere and invaded the Australasian region a number of times, fossil kingfishers have been described from Lower Eocene rocks in Wyoming and Middle Eocene rocks in Germany, around 30–40 million years ago. More recent fossil kingfishers have been described in the Miocene rocks of Australia, amongst the three families, the Alcedinidae are basal to the other two families. The few species found in the Americas, all from the family Cerylidae, the family is a comparatively recent split from the Halcyonidae, diversifying in the Old World as recently as the Miocene or Pliocene. The smallest species of kingfisher is the African dwarf kingfisher, which averages 10.4 g in weight and 10 cm in length, the largest overall is the giant kingfisher, at an average of 355 g and 45 cm. However, the familiar Australian kingfisher known as the laughing kookaburra may be the heaviest species, the plumage of most kingfishers is bright, with green and blue being the most common colours
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Bee-eater
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The bee-eaters are a group of near-passerine birds in the family Meropidae containing three genera and 27 species. Most species are found in Africa and Asia, with a few in southern Europe, Australia and they are characterised by richly coloured plumage, slender bodies, and usually elongated central tail feathers. All have long down-turned bills and medium to long wings, which may be pointed or round, male and female plumages are usually similar. As their name suggests, bee-eaters predominantly eat flying insects, especially bees and wasps, the stinger is removed by repeatedly hitting and rubbing the insect on a hard surface. During this process, pressure is applied to the insect, thereby extracting most of the venom and they form colonies, nesting in burrows tunnelled into vertical sandy banks, often at the side of a river or in flat ground. As they mostly live in colonies, large numbers of nest holes may be seen together, the eggs are white, with typically five to the clutch. Most species are monogamous, and both parents care for the young, sometimes with assistance from related birds in the colony, bee-eaters may be killed by raptors, their nests are raided by rodents and snakes, and they can carry various parasites. Their conspicuous appearance means that they have been mentioned by ancient writers, the bee-eaters were first named as a scientific group by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque-Schmaltz, who created the bird subfamily Meropia for these birds in 1815. The name, now modernised as Meropidae, is derived from Merops, the Ancient Greek for bee-eater, the scarcity of fossils is unhelpful. Bee-eater fossils from the Pleistocene have been found in Austria, and there are Holocene specimens from Israel and Russia, opinions vary as to the bee-eaters nearest relatives. In 2001, Fry considered the kingfishers to be the most likely, a 2009 book supported Frys contention, but then a later study in 2015 suggested that the bee-eaters are sister to the rollers. The 2008 and 2015 papers both linked the kingfishers to the New World motmots, the bee-eaters are generally similar in appearance, although they are normally divided into three genera. All the remaining species are retained in the single genus Merops. The bee-eater family contains the following species, cyanophrys, and the African green bee-eater, M. viridissimus. A2007 nuclear and mitochondrial DNA study produced a possible phylogenetic tree, although the position of the purple-bearded bee-eater appears anomalous, the bee-eaters are morphologically a fairly uniform group. They share many features with related Coraciiformes such as the kingfishers and rollers, being large-headed, short-necked and their wings may be rounded or pointed, with the wing shape closely correlated with the species preferred foraging habitat and migratory tendencies. Shorter, rounder wings are found on species that are sedentary and make typically short foraging flights in denser forests and those with more elongated wings are more migratory. All the bee-eaters are highly aerial, they take off strongly from perches, fly directly without undulations, the flight feathers of the wing comprise 10 primaries, the outermost being very small, and 13 secondaries, and there are 12 tail feathers
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Roller
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The rollers are an Old World family, Coraciidae, of near passerine birds. The group gets its name from the aerial acrobatics some of these birds perform during courtship or territorial flights, rollers resemble crows in size and build, and share the colourful appearance of kingfishers and bee-eaters, blues and pinkish or cinnamon browns predominating. The two inner front toes are connected, but not the outer one. They are mainly insect eaters, with Eurystomus species taking their prey on the wing, although living rollers are birds of warm climates in the Old World, fossil records show that rollers were present in North America during the Eocene. They are monogamous and nest in a hole in a tree or in masonry. The eggs, which are white, hatch after 17–20 days, the roller family Coraciidae was introduced by the French polymath Constantine Samuel Rafinesque in 1815. It is one of nine families in the order Coraciiformes, which includes the motmots, bee-eaters, todies, ground-rollers, cuckoo roller. Apart from the ground-rollers, these families do not appear to be closely related to the rollers. Rollers are divided into two genera as follows, rollers resemble crows in size and build, ranging from 25 to 27 centimetres in length. They share the colourful appearance of kingfishers and bee-eaters, blues, the rollers are similar in general morphology to their relatives in the order Coraciiformes, having large heads on short necks, bright plumage, weak feet and short legs. The two inner front toes are connected, but not the outer one, the bill is robust, and is shorter yet broader in the genus Eurystomus, sometimes known as the broad-billed rollers. The broad-billed rollers have brightly coloured bills, whereas those of the Coracias rollers are black, other differences between the two genera are in wing length, the more aerial Eurystomus rollers have longer wings than the Coracias rollers, this reflects differences in their foraging ecology. Their calls are repeated short, gruff caws, the rollers are found in warmer parts of the Old World. Africa has most species, and is believed to be where the family originated and this is supported by the fact that the related ground-rollers are found on Madagascar. The European roller is completely migratory, breeding in Europe and wintering in Africa, other species are sedentary or short-range migrants. These are birds of open habitats with trees or other elevated perches from which to hunt, rollers are noisy and aggressive when defending their nesting territories, which they patrol while displaying their striking plumage. Intruders are attacked with intimidating rolling dives and they are monogamous and nest in an unlined hole in a tree or in masonry, and lay 2–4 eggs in the tropics, 3–6 at higher latitudes. The eggs, which are white, hatch after 17–20 days, egg laying is staggered at one-day intervals so that if food is short only the older larger nestlings get fed
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Upupiformes
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Bucerotiformes is an order that contains the hornbills, hoopoe and wood hoopoes. Sometimes classified as members of Coraciiformes although increasing amount of evidence seem to support these birds being distinctive enough to warrant their own order, recent genetic data show that ground hornbills and Bycanistes form a clade outside the rest of the hornbill lineage. They are thought to represent an early African lineage, while the rest of Bucerotiformes evolved in Asia, the hoopoe subspecies Saint Helena hoopoe and the Madagascar subspecies are sometimes elevated to a full species. The two wood hoopoe genera, Phoeniculus and Rhinopomastus, appear to have diverged about 10 million years ago, so some systematists treat them as separate subfamilies or even separate families
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Fossil
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Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals, plants, and other organisms from the remote past. The totality of fossils, both discovered and undiscovered, and their placement in fossiliferous rock formations and sedimentary layers is known as the fossil record. The study of fossils across geological time, how they were formed, such a preserved specimen is called a fossil if it is older than some minimum age, most often the arbitrary date of 10,000 years. The observation that fossils were associated with certain rock strata led early geologists to recognize a geological timescale in the 19th century. The development of dating techniques in the early 20th century allowed geologists to determine the numerical or absolute age of the various strata. Like extant organisms, fossils vary in size from microscopic, even single bacterial cells one micrometer in diameter, to gigantic, such as dinosaurs, Fossils may also consist of the marks left behind by the organism while it was alive, such as animal tracks or feces. These types of fossil are called trace fossils, as opposed to body fossils, finally, past life leaves some markers that cannot be seen but can be detected in the form of biochemical signals, these are known as chemofossils or biosignatures. The process of fossilization varies according to type and external conditions. Permineralization is a process of fossilization that occurs when an organism is buried, the empty spaces within an organism become filled with mineral-rich groundwater. Minerals precipitate from the groundwater, occupying the empty spaces and this process can occur in very small spaces, such as within the cell wall of a plant cell. Small scale permineralization can produce very detailed fossils, for permineralization to occur, the organism must become covered by sediment soon after death or soon after the initial decay process. The degree to which the remains are decayed when covered determines the later details of the fossil, some fossils consist only of skeletal remains or teeth, other fossils contain traces of skin, feathers or even soft tissues. This is a form of diagenesis, in some cases the original remains of the organism completely dissolve or are otherwise destroyed. The remaining organism-shaped hole in the rock is called an external mold, if this hole is later filled with other minerals, it is a cast. An endocast or internal mold is formed when sediments or minerals fill the cavity of an organism. This is a form of cast and mold formation. If the chemistry is right, the organism can act as a nucleus for the precipitation of minerals such as siderite, if this happens rapidly before significant decay to the organic tissue, very fine three-dimensional morphological detail can be preserved. Nodules from the Carboniferous Mazon Creek fossil beds of Illinois, USA, are among the best documented examples of such mineralization, replacement occurs when the shell, bone or other tissue is replaced with another mineral
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Quaternary
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Quaternary is the current and most recent of the three periods of the Cenozoic Era in the geologic time scale of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. It follows the Neogene Period and spans from 2.588 ±0.005 million years ago to the present, the Quaternary Period is divided into two epochs, the Pleistocene and the Holocene. The informal term Late Quaternary refers to the past 0. 5–1.0 million years, the Quaternary Period is typically defined by the cyclic growth and decay of continental ice sheets driven by Milankovitch cycles and the associated climate and environmental changes that occurred. The term Quaternary was proposed by Giovanni Arduino in 1759 for alluvial deposits in the Po River valley in northern Italy and it was introduced by Jules Desnoyers in 1829 for sediments of Frances Seine Basin that seemed clearly to be younger than Tertiary Period rocks. The Quaternary Period follows the Neogene Period and extends to the present, the Quaternary covers the time span of glaciations classified as the Pleistocene, and includes the present interglacial time-period, the Holocene. This places the start of the Quaternary at the onset of Northern Hemisphere glaciation approximately 2.6 million years ago, Quaternary stratigraphers usually worked with regional subdivisions. From the 1970s, the International Commission on Stratigraphy tried to make a single geologic time scale based on GSSPs, the Quaternary subdivisions were defined based on biostratigraphy instead of paleoclimate. This led to the problem that the base of the Pleistocene was at 1.805 Mya. The ICS then proposed to use of the name Quaternary altogether. The Anthropocene has been proposed as an epoch as a mark of the anthropogenic impact on the global environment starting with the Industrial Revolution. The Anthropocene is not officially designated by the ICS, however, the 2.6 million years of the Quaternary represents the time during which recognizable humans existed. Over this short period, there has been relatively little change in the distribution of the continents due to plate tectonics. The Quaternary geological record is preserved in detail than that for earlier periods. The climate was one of periodic glaciations with continental glaciers moving as far from the poles as 40 degrees latitude, there was a major extinction of large mammals in Northern areas at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch. Many forms such as saber-toothed cats, mammoths, mastodons, glyptodonts, others, including horses, camels and American cheetahs became extinct in North America. Glaciation took place repeatedly during the Quaternary Ice Age – a term coined by Schimper in 1839 that began with the start of the Quaternary about 2.58 Mya and continues to the present-day. In 1821, a Swiss engineer, Ignaz Venetz, presented an article in which he suggested the presence of traces of the passage of a glacier at a distance from the Alps. This idea was initially disputed by another Swiss scientist, Louis Agassiz, a year later, Agassiz raised the hypothesis of a great glacial period that would have had long-reaching general effects
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Wood hoopoe
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The wood hoopoes and scimitarbills are a small African family, Phoeniculidae, of near passerine birds. They live south of the Sahara Desert and are not migratory, while the family is now restricted to Sub-Saharan Africa, fossil evidence shows that it once had a larger distribution. Fossils attributed to this family have found in Miocene rocks in Germany. The wood hoopoes are related to the kingfishers, the rollers, a close relationship between the hoopoe and the wood hoopoes is also supported by the shared and unique nature of their stapes. The wood hoopoes most resemble the true hoopoe with their long down-curved bills, the wood hoopoes are a morphologically distinct group, unlikely to be mistaken for any other. They have metallic plumage, often blue, green or purple, the sexes are similar in all but two species, the forest wood hoopoe and the common scimitarbill. Their bills are red or black, although young red-billed species also have black bills. The legs are scarlet or black, short, with thick tarsi and they climb tree trunks in the manner of a woodpecker, and when feeding on the ground they hop rather than walking like the true hoopoe. Their tails are long and strongly graduated, and marked conspicuously with white and these are birds of open woodland, savannah, or thornbrush, and are mainly arboreal. They require large trees both for feeding on as well as to provide hollows for nesting and nocturnal roosting, two species are found exclusively in rainforest, the forest wood hoopoe and the white-headed wood hoopoe. All the other species are found in open woodland and bush. They feed on arthropods, especially insects, which they find by probing with their bills in rotten wood and they nest in unlined tree holes, laying two to four eggs, which are blue, grey, or olive, and unmarked in most species
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Miocene
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The Miocene is the first geological epoch of the Neogene Period and extends from about 23.03 to 5.333 million years ago. The Miocene was named by Sir Charles Lyell and its name comes from the Greek words μείων and καινός and means less recent because it has 18% fewer modern sea invertebrates than the Pliocene. The Miocene follows the Oligocene Epoch and is followed by the Pliocene Epoch, the earth went from the Oligocene through the Miocene and into the Pliocene, with the climate slowly cooling towards a series of ice ages. The Miocene boundaries are not marked by a single distinct global event, the apes arose and diversified during the Miocene, becoming widespread in the Old World. By the end of this epoch, the ancestors of humans had split away from the ancestors of the chimpanzees to follow their own evolutionary path, as in the Oligocene before it, grasslands continued to expand and forests to dwindle in extent. In the Miocene seas, kelp forests made their first appearance, the plants and animals of the Miocene were fairly modern. The Miocene faunal stages from youngest to oldest are typically named according to the International Commission on Stratigraphy, Two subdivisions each form the lower, middle, continents continued to drift toward their present positions. Mountain building took place in western North America, Europe, both continental and marine Miocene deposits are common worldwide with marine outcrops common near modern shorelines. Well studied continental exposures occur in the North American Great Plains, India continued to collide with Asia, creating dramatic new mountain ranges. The Tethys Seaway continued to shrink and then disappeared as Africa collided with Eurasia in the Turkish–Arabian region between 19 and 12 Ma. The subsequent uplift of mountains in the western Mediterranean region and a fall in sea levels combined to cause a temporary drying up of the Mediterranean Sea near the end of the Miocene. The global trend was towards increasing aridity caused primarily by global cooling reducing the ability of the atmosphere to absorb moisture, climates remained moderately warm, although the slow global cooling that eventually led to the Pleistocene glaciations continued. Although a long-term cooling trend was well underway, there is evidence of a period during the Miocene when the global climate rivalled that of the Oligocene. The Miocene warming began 21 million years ago and continued until 14 million years ago, by 8 million years ago, temperatures dropped sharply once again, and the Antarctic ice sheet was already approaching its present-day size and thickness. Greenland may have begun to have large glaciers as early as 7 to 8 million years ago, life during the Miocene Epoch was mostly supported by the two newly formed biomes, kelp forests and grasslands. This allows for more grazers, such as horses, rhinoceroses, ninety five percent of modern plants existed by the end of this epoch. The higher organic content and water retention of the deeper and richer grassland soils, with long term burial of carbon in sediments, produced a carbon and this, combined with higher surface albedo and lower evapotranspiration of grassland, contributed to a cooler, drier climate. The expansion of grasslands and radiations among terrestrial herbivores correlates to fluctuations in CO2
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Messelirrisor
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The extinct Messelirrisoridae are a family of Bucerotiformes. Tiny hoopoe-like birds, they were among the predominant small forest birds of Central Europe during the Middle Eocene, fossilized remains of the single known genus Messelirrisor have been found in the Messel Pit. The Messelirrisoridae are the earliest representatives of the hoopoe/wood-hoopoe lineage known at present, tiny hoopoe-like birds from the Middle Eocene of Messel. The Auk 117, 964-970 http, //cat. inist. fr/. aModele=afficheN&cpsidt=1528405 Specimen photo
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Eocene
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The Eocene Epoch, lasting from 56 to 33.9 million years ago, is a major division of the geologic timescale and the second epoch of the Paleogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Eocene spans the time from the end of the Paleocene Epoch to the beginning of the Oligocene Epoch. The start of the Eocene is marked by a period in which the concentration of the carbon isotope 13C in the atmosphere was exceptionally low in comparison with the more common isotope 12C. As with other periods, the strata that define the start and end of the epoch are well identified. The name Eocene comes from the Ancient Greek ἠώς and καινός, the Eocene epoch is conventionally divided into early, middle, and late subdivisions. The corresponding rocks are referred to as lower, middle, the Ypresian stage constitutes the lower, the Priabonian stage the upper, and the Lutetian and Bartonian stages are united as the middle Eocene. The Eocene Epoch contained a variety of different climate conditions that includes the warmest climate in the Cenozoic Era. During this period of time, little to no ice was present on Earth with a difference in temperature from the equator to the poles. Following the maximum was a descent into an icehouse climate from the Eocene Optimum to the Eocene-Oligocene transition at 34 million years ago. During this decrease ice began to reappear at the poles, greenhouse gases, in particular carbon dioxide and methane, played a significant role during the Eocene in controlling the surface temperature. For the early Eocene there is discussion on how much carbon dioxide was in the atmosphere. This is due to numerous proxies representing different atmospheric carbon dioxide content, for contrast, today the carbon dioxide levels are at 400 ppm or 0. 04%. At about the beginning of the Eocene Epoch the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere more or less doubled. During the early Eocene, methane was another gas that had a drastic effect on the climate. In comparison to carbon dioxide, methane has much effect on temperature as methane is ~34 times more effective per molecule than carbon dioxide on a 100-year scale. Most of the methane released to the atmosphere during this period of time would have been from wetlands, swamps, the atmospheric methane concentration today is 0. 000179% or 1.79 ppmv. Due to the climate and sea level rise associated with the early Eocene, more wetlands, more forests. Comparing the early Eocene production of methane to current levels of atmospheric methane, biogenic production of methane produces carbon dioxide and water vapor along with the methane, as well as yielding infrared radiation
30.
African hoopoe
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The hoopoe /ˈhuːpuː/ is a colourful bird found across Afro-Eurasia, notable for its distinctive crown of feathers. It is the extant species in the family Upupidae. One insular species, the Saint Helena hoopoe, is extinct, Upupa and epops are respectively the Latin and Ancient Greek names for the hoopoe, both, like the English name, are onomatopoeic forms which imitate the cry of the bird. In Ancient Egypt the species was known under two names, the earliest most probably having been *db3. w and/or *db3. t) the one who blocks up <its nesthole>. Therefore also the early Eg. word db<3>. t meaning sundried brick was often written with the hoopoe-hieroglyph, here used as a phonogram. The youngest name -dating from New Kingdom to late demotic texts- was kkp. t, this name akin to Biblical Hebrew douchiphat, the hoopoe was classified in the clade Coraciiformes, which also includes kingfishers, bee-eaters, and rollers. A close relationship between the hoopoe and the woodhoopoes is also supported by the shared and unique nature of their stapes, in the Sibley-Ahlquist taxonomy, the hoopoe is separated from the Coraciiformes as a separate order, the Upupiformes. Some authorities place the woodhoopoes in the Upupiformes as well, now the consensus is that both hoopoe and the wood hoopoes belowng with the hornbills in the Bucerotiformes. The fossil record of the hoopoes is very incomplete, with the earliest fossil coming from the Quaternary, the fossil record of their relatives is older, with fossil woodhoopoes dating back to the Miocene and those of an extinct related family, the Messelirrisoridae, dating from the Eocene. It is the only extant member of its family, although some consider some of the subspecies as separate species. Several authors have separated the Madagascan subspecies as a separate species, the morphological differences between the most commonly split subspecies, U. e. marginata, and the other subspecies are minor, and only U. e. marginata has distinctly different vocalisations. One accepted separate species, the Saint Helena hoopoe, U. antaios, lived on the island of St Helena but became extinct in the 16th century, the genus Upupa was created by Linnaeus in his Systema naturae in 1758. Nine subspecies of hoopoe are recognised by Kristin and they vary mostly in size and the depth of colour in the plumage. Two further subspecies have been proposed, U. e. minor in South Africa, the hoopoe is a medium-sized bird, 25–32 cm long, with a 44–48 cm wingspan. The species is distinctive, with a long, thin tapering bill that is black with a fawn base. The strengthened musculature of the head allows the bill to be opened when probing inside the soil, the hoopoe has broad and rounded wings capable of strong flight, these are larger in the northern migratory subspecies. The hoopoe has an undulating flight, which is like that of a giant butterfly. Adults may begin their moult after the season and continue after they have migrated for the winter
31.
Saint Helena
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It is part of the British Overseas Territory of Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha. Saint Helena measures about 16 by 8 kilometres and has a population of 4,534 and it was named after Saint Helena of Constantinople. The island, one of the most remote islands in the world, was uninhabited when discovered by the Portuguese in 1502 and it was an important stopover for ships sailing to Europe from Asia and South Africa for centuries. Napoleon was imprisoned there in exile by the British, as were Dinuzulu kaCetshwayo, between 1791 and 1833, Saint Helena became the site of a series of experiments in conservation, reforestation and attempts to boost rainfall artificially. This environmental intervention was closely linked to the conceptualisation of the processes of environmental change, Saint Helena is Britains second-oldest remaining overseas territory after Bermuda. The Portuguese found the island uninhabited, with an abundance of trees and they imported livestock, fruit trees and vegetables, and built a chapel and one or two houses. Englishman Sir Francis Drake probably located the island on the leg of his circumnavigation of the world. In developing their Far East trade, the Dutch also began to frequent the island, the Dutch Republic formally made claim to Saint Helena in 1633, although there is no evidence that they ever occupied, colonized, or fortified it. By 1651, the Dutch had mainly abandoned the island in favour of their colony at the Cape of Good Hope. In 1657, Oliver Cromwell granted the English East India Company a charter to govern Saint Helena and, the following year, the first governor Captain John Dutton arrived in 1659, making Saint Helena one of Britains oldest colonies outside North America and the Caribbean. A fort and houses were built, after the Restoration of the English monarchy in 1660, the East India Company received a royal charter giving it the sole right to fortify and colonise the island. The fort was renamed James Fort and the town Jamestown, in honour of the Duke of York, between January and May 1673, the Dutch East India Company forcibly took the island, before English reinforcements restored English East India Company control. The company experienced difficulty attracting new immigrants, and sentiments of unrest, a census in 1723 recorded 1,110 people, including 610 slaves. The island enjoyed a period of prosperity from about 1770. Captain James Cook visited the island in 1775 on the leg of his second circumnavigation of the world. St. James Church was erected in Jamestown in 1774, the site of this telescope is near Saint Mathews Church in Hutts Gate in the Longwood district. The 680-metre high hill there is named for him and is called Halleys Mount, throughout this period, Saint Helena was an important port of call of the East India Company. East Indiamen would stop there on the leg of their voyages to British India
32.
Northern bald ibis
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The northern bald ibis, hermit ibis, or waldrapp is a migratory bird found in barren, semi-desert or rocky habitats, often close to running water. This 70–80 cm glossy black ibis, which, unlike members of the ibis family, is non-wading, has an unfeathered red face and head. It breeds colonially on coastal or mountain cliff ledges, where it lays two to three eggs in a stick nest, and feeds on lizards, insects, and other small animals. The northern bald ibis was widespread across the Middle East, northern Africa, southern and central Europe. It disappeared from Europe over 300 years ago, and is now considered critically endangered, There are believed to be about 500 wild birds remaining in southern Morocco, and fewer than 10 in Syria, where it was rediscovered in 2002. The reasons for the species long-term decline are unclear, but hunting, loss of foraging habitat, the ibises are gregarious, long-legged wading birds with long down-curved bills. Along with the spoonbills they form one subfamily within the Threskiornithidae family, the northern bald ibis closest relative, and the only other member of the genus, is the southern bald ibis, G. calvus, of southern Africa. It was moved to its current genus by the German herpetologist Johann Georg Wagler in 1832 and this species has an interesting history of description, oblivion and rediscovery. One consistent difference between the eastern and western birds is a mutation in the cytochrome b gene of their mitochondrial DNA. The genus name, Geronticus, is derived from the Ancient Greek γέρων, meaning old man, Eremita is Late Latin for hermit, from the Greek ἐρημία, meaning desert, and refers to the arid habitats inhabited by this species. The alternative common name waldrapp is German for forest crow, the equivalent of the Latin Corvo sylvatico of Gesner, adapted as Corvus sylvaticus by Linnaeus. The northern bald ibis is a large, glossy black bird, 70–80 cm long with a 125–135 cm wingspan, the plumage is black, with bronze-green and violet iridescence, and there is a wispy ruff on the birds hind neck. The face and head are dull red and unfeathered, and the long, curved bill, in flight, this bird has powerful, shallow, and flexible wing beats. It gives guttural hrump and high, hoarse hyoh calls at its breeding colonies, the sexes are similar in plumage, although males are generally larger than females, and, as with other ibises that breed in colonies, have longer bills. The longer-billed males are more successful in attracting a mate, the downy chick has uniformly pale brown plumage, and the fledged juvenile resembles the adult except that it has a dark head, light grey legs, and a pale bill. The unfeathered areas of the birds head and neck gradually become red as it matures. Moroccan birds have a longer bill than Turkish birds of the same sex. The northern bald ibis is distinguished from its close relative
33.
Red-billed chough
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The red-billed chough, Cornish chough or simply chough, is a bird in the crow family, one of only two species in the genus Pyrrhocorax. Its eight subspecies breed on mountains and coastal cliffs from the coasts of Ireland and Britain east through southern Europe and North Africa to Central Asia, India. This bird has black plumage, a long curved red bill, red legs. It has a buoyant acrobatic flight with widely spread primaries, the red-billed chough pairs for life and displays fidelity to its breeding site, which is usually a cave or crevice in a cliff face. It builds a stick nest and lays three eggs. It feeds, often in flocks, on short grazed grassland, the red-billed chough, which derived its common name from the jackdaw, was formerly associated with fire-raising, and has links with Saint Thomas Becket and Cornwall. The red-billed chough has been depicted on stamps of a few countries, including the Isle of Man, with four different stamps, and The Gambia. The red-billed chough was first described by Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae in 1758 as Upupa pyrrhocorax and it was moved to its current genus, Pyrrhocorax, by Marmaduke Tunstall in his 1771 Ornithologia Britannica. The genus name is derived from Greek πυρρός, flame-coloured, and κόραξ, the only other member of the genus is the Alpine chough, Pyrrhocorax graculus. The closest relatives of the choughs are the typical crows, Corvus, chough was originally an alternative onomatopoeic name for the jackdaw, Corvus monedula, based on its call. The similar red-billed species, formerly common in Cornwall, became known initially as Cornish chough and then just chough. The Australian white-winged chough, Corcorax melanorhamphos, despite its similar shape and habits, is distantly related to the true choughs. There are eight extant subspecies, although differences between them are slight, P. p. P. p. erythropthalmus, described by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1817 as Coracia erythrorhamphos, occurs in the red-billed choughs continental European range, excluding Greece. It is larger and slightly greener than the nominate race, P. p. barbarus, described by Charles Vaurie under its current name in 1954, is resident in North Africa and on La Palma in the Canary Islands. Compared to P. p. erythropthalmus, it is larger, has a tail and wings. It is the form, both absolutely and relatively. P. p. baileyi described by Austin Loomer Rand and Charles Vaurie under its current name in 1955, is a subspecies endemic to Ethiopia. The two populations could possibly represent different subspecies, P. p. docilis, described by Johann Friedrich Gmelin as Corvus docilis in 1774, breeds from Greece to Afghanistan
34.
Greater hoopoe-lark
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It was formerly known as the bifasciated lark and sometimes as the large desert lark. Formerly, the greater hoopoe-lark was classified as belonging to the genera Upupa, the name Alaemon comes from the Greek alēmōn, meaning wanderer. The genus was established by Alexander Keyserling and Johann Heinrich Blasius in 1840, a. desertorum -, Originally described as a separate species in the genus Alauda. Found in north-eastern Sudan to northern Somalia, central Saudi Arabia to southern Yemen Eastern greater hoopoe-lark -, found in eastern Arabia to Iraq, Iran and north-western India This lark is large, long-legged and slender-bodied with a distinctive down-curved bill. The face has dark markings including a line through the eye, the breast is spotted and the underside is buffy white while the upper-parts are sandy grey. The female is smaller with less prominent markings and the bill is slightly shorter. The hind claw is short and straight, the curved upper beak has the nostril opening exposed. The tongue is bifid at the tip, birds are seen singly or in pairs as they forage by running or walking in spurts, probing and digging the ground. They have been recorded to feed on the bodies of certain fungi. The breeding season is mainly after the first rains, in India most records are from March to July, late records in August when the rains were delayed have been noted in India. The courtship display of the consists of rising with fluttering wing-strokes. The slow flappy start to the song flight recall a hoopoe for which species is named. The striking wing pattern of wing feathers with a white base and trailing edge. The male also sings with rising and falling notes consisting of trilled whistles, the typical call is a rolling zreee or too. The nest is a cup made up of sticks and placed on a low bush or on the ground. The nest is prominent and often placed on an isolated bush, two or three eggs are laid and both sexes take turns in incubation. They feed on insects and other invertebrates, small lizards and seeds, young birds are capable of swift running even before they can fly. The female may perform distraction displays when the young or nest are threatened, during the heat of the day, they may shelter in the burrows of Uromastyx lizards
35.
Tibet
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Tibet is a region on the Tibetan Plateau in Asia, spanning about 2.4 million km2 and nearly a quarter of Chinas territory. Tibet is the highest region on Earth, with an elevation of 4,900 metres. The highest elevation in Tibet is Mount Everest, Earths highest mountain, the Tibetan Empire emerged in the 7th century, but with the fall of the empire the region soon divided into a variety of territories. The current borders of Tibet were generally established in the 18th century, following the Xinhai Revolution against the Qing dynasty in 1912, Qing soldiers were disarmed and escorted out of Tibet Area. The region subsequently declared its independence in 1913 without recognition by the subsequent Chinese Republican government, later, Lhasa took control of the western part of Xikang, China. There are tensions regarding Tibets political status and dissident groups that are active in exile and it is also said that Tibetan activists in Tibet have been arrested or tortured. The economy of Tibet is dominated by agriculture, though tourism has become a growing industry in recent decades. The dominant religion in Tibet is Tibetan Buddhism, in there is Bön, which is similar to Tibetan Buddhism. Tibetan Buddhism is an influence on the art, music. Tibetan architecture reflects Chinese and Indian influences, staple foods in Tibet are roasted barley, yak meat, and butter tea. The Tibetan name for their land, Bod བོད་, means Tibet or Tibetan Plateau, although it meant the central region around Lhasa. The Standard Tibetan pronunciation of Bod, is transcribed Bhö in Tournadre Phonetic Transcription, Bö in the THL Simplified Phonetic Transcription and Poi in Tibetan pinyin. Tibetan people, language, and culture, regardless of where they are from, are referred to as Zang although the geographical term Xīzàng is often limited to the Tibet Autonomous Region. The term Xīzàng was coined during the Qing dynasty in the reign of the Jiaqing Emperor through the addition of a prefix meaning west to Zang, the best-known medieval Chinese name for Tibet is Tubo. This name first appears in Chinese characters as 土番 in the 7th century, in the Middle Chinese spoken during that period, as reconstructed by William H. Baxter, 土番 was pronounced thux-phjon and 吐蕃 was pronounced thux-pjon. Other pre-modern Chinese names for Tibet include Wusiguo, Wusizang, Tubote, the English word Tibet or Thibet dates back to the 18th century. Historical linguists generally agree that Tibet names in European languages are loanwords from Semitic Ṭībat orTūbātt, itself deriving from Turkic Töbäd, literally, according to Matthew Kapstein, From the perspective of historical linguistics, Tibetan most closely resembles Burmese among the major languages of Asia. More controversial is the theory that the Tibeto-Burman family is part of a larger language family, called Sino-Tibetan
36.
Bird migration
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Bird migration is the regular seasonal movement, often north and south along a flyway, between breeding and wintering grounds. Migration carries high costs in predation and mortality, including from hunting by humans and it occurs mainly in the northern hemisphere, where birds are funnelled on to specific routes by natural barriers such as the Mediterranean Sea or the Caribbean Sea. More recently, Johannes Leche began recording dates of arrivals of spring migrants in Finland in 1749, threats to migratory birds have grown with habitat destruction especially of stopover and wintering sites, as well as structures such as power lines and wind farms. The Arctic tern holds the long-distance migration record for birds, travelling between Arctic breeding grounds and the Antarctic each year, shorter migrations are common, including altitudinal migrations on mountains such as the Andes and Himalayas. The timing of migration seems to be controlled primarily by changes in day length, migrating birds navigate using celestial cues from the sun and stars, the earths magnetic field, and probably also mental maps. Records of bird migration were made as much as 3,000 years ago by the Ancient Greek writers Hesiod, Homer, Herodotus and Aristotle. The Bible also notes migrations, as in the Book of Job, the author of Jeremiah wrote, Even the stork in the heavens knows its seasons, and the turtle dove, the swift and the crane keep the time of their arrival. Aristotle noted that cranes traveled from the steppes of Scythia to marshes at the headwaters of the Nile, pliny the Elder, in his Historia Naturalis, repeats Aristotles observations. Aristotle however suggested that swallows and other birds hibernated and this belief persisted as late as 1878, when Elliott Coues listed the titles of no less than 182 papers dealing with the hibernation of swallows. It was not until the end of the century that migration as an explanation for the winter disappearance of birds from northern climes was accepted. Bewick then describes an experiment which succeeded in keeping alive in Britain for several years. He concludes, These experiments have since been confirmed by. Migration is the seasonal movement, often north and south. Bird movements include those made in response to changes in food availability, habitat, sometimes, journeys are not termed true migration because they are irregular or in only one direction. Migration is marked by its annual seasonality, non-migratory birds are said to be resident or sedentary. Approximately 1800 of the worlds 10,000 bird species are long-distance migrants, many bird populations migrate long distances along a flyway. The most common pattern involves flying north in the spring to breed in the temperate or Arctic summer, of course, in the southern hemisphere the directions are reversed, but there is less land area in the far south to support long-distance migration. The primary motivation for migration appears to be food, for example, also, the longer days of the northern summer provide extended time for breeding birds to feed their young
37.
Vagrancy (biology)
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Vagrancy is a phenomenon in biology whereby individual animals appear well outside their normal range, individual animals which exhibit vagrancy are known as vagrants. The term accidental is sometimes also used, there are a number of factors which might cause an individual to become a vagrant — genetic factors and weather conditions are two — but the causes are overall poorly understood. Vagrancy can be a precursor to colonisation if individuals survive, vagrancy is known to occur in birds, insects, mammals and turtles. For example, Siberian passerines which normally winter in Southeast Asia are commonly found in Northwest Europe and this is reverse migration, where the birds migrate in the opposite direction to that expected. The causes of this are unknown, but genetic mutation or other anomalies relating to the birds magnetic sensibilities is suspected, other birds are sent off course by storms, such as North American birds, blown across the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. Birds can also be out to sea, become physically exhausted, land on a ship. Vagrancy in insects is recorded from many groups — it is particularly well-studied in butterflies and moths, in mammals, vagrancy has been recorded for bats, pinniped seals, whales and manatees. Vagrancy has been recorded for turtles, snakes, crocodilians, and it therefore seems to be a fairly widespread phenomenon in reptiles. Saltwater crocodiles are especially prone to vagrancy, with individuals occasionally being recorded in odd places including Fiji, Iwo Jima, and even the Sea of Japan. The term vagrant is also used of plants, to refer to a plant that is growing far away from its species usual range with the connotation of being a temporary population. In the context of lichens, a vagrant form or species occurs unattached to a substrate, not necessarily outside its range
38.
Alaska
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Alaska is a U. S. state located in the northwest extremity of North America. To the north are the Chukchi and Beaufort seas–the southern parts of the Arctic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean lies to the south and southwest. Alaska is the largest state in the United States by area, the 3rd least populous, approximately half of Alaskas residents live within the Anchorage metropolitan area. Alaskas economy is dominated by the fishing, natural gas, military bases and tourism are also a significant part of the economy. The United States purchased Alaska from the Russian Empire on March 30,1867, the area went through several administrative changes before becoming organized as a territory on May 11,1912. It was admitted as the 49th state of the U. S. on January 3,1959, the name Alaska was introduced in the Russian colonial period when it was used to refer to the peninsula. It was derived from an Aleut, or Unangam idiom, which refers to the mainland of Alaska. Literally, it means object to which the action of the sea is directed, Alaska is the northernmost and westernmost state in the United States and has the most easterly longitude in the United States because the Aleutian Islands extend into the Eastern Hemisphere. Alaska is the only non-contiguous U. S. state on continental North America and it is technically part of the continental U. S. but is sometimes not included in colloquial use, Alaska is not part of the contiguous U. S. often called the Lower 48. The capital city, Juneau, is situated on the mainland of the North American continent but is not connected by road to the rest of the North American highway system. Alaskas territorial waters touch Russias territorial waters in the Bering Strait, as the Russian Big Diomede Island, Alaska has a longer coastline than all the other U. S. states combined. Alaska is the largest state in the United States by total area at 663,268 square miles, over twice the size of Texas, Alaska is larger than all but 18 sovereign countries. Counting territorial waters, Alaska is larger than the area of the next three largest states, Texas, California, and Montana. It is also larger than the area of the 22 smallest U. S. states. Also referred to as the Panhandle or Inside Passage, this is the region of Alaska closest to the rest of the United States, as such, this was where most of the initial non-indigenous settlement occurred in the years following the Alaska Purchase. The region is dominated by the Alexander Archipelago as well as the Tongass National Forest and it contains the state capital Juneau, the former capital Sitka, and Ketchikan, at one time Alaskas largest city. The Alaska Marine Highway provides a vital transportation link throughout the area. The Interior is the largest region of Alaska, much of it is uninhabited wilderness, Fairbanks is the only large city in the region
39.
Himalayas
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The Himalayas, or Himalaya, form a mountain range in Asia separating the plains of the Indian subcontinent from the Tibetan Plateau. The Himalayan range has the Earths highest peaks, including the highest, the Himalayas include over a hundred mountains exceeding 7,200 metres in elevation. By contrast, the highest peak outside Asia – Aconcagua, in the Andes – is 6,961 metres tall. The Himalayas are spread across five countries, Bhutan, India, Nepal, China, the Himalayan range is bordered on the northwest by the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, on the north by the Tibetan Plateau, and on the south by the Indo-Gangetic Plain. Some of the major rivers, the Indus, the Ganges, and the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra, rise in the Himalayas. The Himalayas have profoundly shaped the cultures of South Asia, many Himalayan peaks are sacred in Hinduism and Buddhism. Lifted by the subduction of the Indian tectonic plate under the Eurasian Plate and its western anchor, Nanga Parbat, lies just south of the northernmost bend of Indus river. Its eastern anchor, Namcha Barwa, is just west of the bend of the Tsangpo river. The range varies in width from 400 kilometres in the west to 150 kilometres in the east, the name of the range derives from the Sanskrit Himā-laya, from himá and ā-laya. They are now known as the Himalaya Mountains, usually shortened to the Himalayas, formerly, they were described in the singular as the Himalaya. This was also previously transcribed Himmaleh, as in Emily Dickinsons poetry and Henry David Thoreaus essays. The mountains are known as the Himālaya in Nepali and Hindi, the Himalaya or The Land of Snow in Tibetan, the Hamaleh Mountain Range in Urdu, the flora and fauna of the Himalayas vary with climate, rainfall, altitude, and soils. The climate ranges from tropical at the base of the mountains to permanent ice, the amount of yearly rainfall increases from west to east along the southern front of the range. This diversity of altitude, rainfall and soil conditions combined with the high snow line supports a variety of distinct plant. The extremes of high altitude combined with extreme cold favor extremophile organisms, the unique floral and faunal wealth of the Himalayas is undergoing structural and compositional changes due to climate change. The increase in temperature is shifting various species to higher elevations, the oak forest is being invaded by pine forests in the Garhwal Himalayan region. There are reports of early flowering and fruiting in some species, especially rhododendron, apple. The highest known tree species in the Himalayas is Juniperus tibetica located at 4,900 metres in Southeastern Tibet, the Himalayan range is one of the youngest mountain ranges on the planet and consists mostly of uplifted sedimentary and metamorphic rock
40.
Shanghai Museum
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The Shanghai Museum is a museum of ancient Chinese art, situated on the Peoples Square in the Huangpu District of Shanghai, China. Rebuilt at its current location in 1996, it is considered one of Chinas first world-class modern museums, the museum was founded in 1952 and was first open to the public in the former Shanghai Racecourse club house, now at 325 West Nanjing Road. The former Shanghai Municipal Museum was also merged into the new Shanghai Museum, in 1959 the museum moved into the Zhonghui Building at 16 South Henan Road, which previously housed insurance companies and bank offices. During the metal-gathering campaign of the Great Leap Forward, Shanghai Museum participated in rescuing bronzeware from metal that had been confiscated or donated and were sent to be melted down, before the Cultural Revolution, a tradition formed whereby Shanghais wealthy collectors would make annual donations to the museum. The museums work largely halted as a result of the Cultural Revolution, the growth of its collections put enormous pressure on the museums cramped premises. When a new museum was omitted from Shanghais five-year reconstruction plan in 1992, after seeing the dilapidated rooms of the Zhonghui Building, Huang agreed to allocate a prime site on the Peoples Square, but the museum had to raise its own building funds. Ma raised US$25 million by leasing the old building to a Hong Kong developer and he also made many trips abroad to solicit donations, mainly from the Shanghai diaspora who had fled to Hong Kong after the Communist revolution, raising another $10 million. The money still ran short, but he won another 140 million yuan from the city government to complete the building. Construction of the current building started in August 1993 and it was inaugurated on October 12,1996 to wide acclaim. It is 29.5 meters high with five floors, covering an area of 39,200 m². Designed by local architect Xing Tonghe, the building is designed in the shape of an ancient bronze cooking vessel called a ding and it is said that the inspiration for the design was specifically provided by the Da Ke Ding, now on exhibit in the museum. The building has a top and a square base, symbolizing the ancient Chinese perception of the world as round sky. The museum has a collection of over 120,000 pieces, including bronze, ceramics, calligraphy, furniture, jades, ancient coins, paintings, seals, sculptures, minority art and foreign art. The Shanghai Museum houses several items of importance, including one of three extant specimens of a transparent bronze mirror from the Han Dynasty. It has eleven galleries and three special exhibition halls. The collection contains 1783 pieces from the Greeks to the Mongol Empire, ancient Chinese Ceramic Gallery The Shanghai Museum. Shanghai, Shanghai Classics Publishing House,1996
41.
Uttarakhand
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Uttarakhand, officially the State of Uttarakhand, formerly known as Uttaranchal, is a state in the northern part of India. It is often referred to as the Devbhumi due to many Hindu temples, Uttarakhand is known for its natural beauty of the Himalayas, the Bhabhar and the Terai. On 9 November 2000, Uttarakhand became the 27th state of the Republic of India, being created from the Himalayan, the state is divided into two divisions, Garhwal and Kumaon, with a total of 13 districts. The interim capital of Uttarakhand is Dehradun, the largest city in the region, the High Court of the state is in Nainital. Archaeological evidence supports the existence of humans in the region since prehistoric times, the region formed a part of the Kuru and the Panchal kingdoms during the Vedic age of Ancient India. Among the first major dynasties of Kumaon were the Kunindas in the 2nd century BCE who practised a form of Shaivism. Ashokan edicts at Kalsi show the presence of Buddhism in this region. During the medieval period, the region was consolidated under the Kumaon Kingdom, in 1816, most of modern Uttarakhand was ceded to the British as part of the Treaty of Sugauli. The natives of the state are generally called Uttarakhandi, or more specifically either Garhwali or Kumaoni by their region of origin, according to the 2011 Census of India, Uttarakhand has a population of 10,116,752, making it the 19th most populous state in India. Uttarakhands name is derived from the Sanskrit words uttara meaning north, the name finds mention in early Hindu scriptures as the combined region of Kedarkhand and Manaskhand. Uttarakhand was also the ancient Puranic term for the stretch of the Indian Himalayas. Chosen for its allegedly less separatist connotations, the name change generated enormous controversy among many activists for a separate state who saw it as a political act, the name Uttarakhand remained popular in the region, even while Uttaranchal was promulgated through official usage. In August 2006, Union Cabinet of India assented to the demands of the Uttaranchal state assembly, legislation to that effect was passed by the Uttarakhand Legislative Assembly in October 2006, and the Union Cabinet brought in the bill in the winter session of Parliament. The bill was passed by Parliament and signed into law by then President A. P. J. Abdul Kalam in December 2006, and since January 1,2007 the state has been known as Uttarakhand. Ancient rock paintings, rock shelters, paleolithic stone tools, there are also archaeological remains which show the existence of early Vedic practices in the area. The Pauravas, Kushanas, Kunindas, Guptas, Gurjara-Pratihara, Katyuris, Raikas, Palas, Chands, Parmars or Panwars, at that time, present-day Uttarakhand also served as a habitat for Rishis and Sadhus. It is believed that the sage Vyasa scripted the Hindu epic Mahabharata in the state, among the first major dynasties of Garhwal and Kumaon were the Kunindas in the 2nd century BCE who practised an early form of Shaivism and traded salt with Western Tibet. It is evident from the Ashokan edict at Kalsi in Western Garhwal that Buddhism made inroads in this region, folk shamanic practices deviating from Hindu orthodoxy also persisted here
42.
Monogamy
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Monogamy is a form of relationship in which an individual has only one partner during his or her lifetime or at any one time, as compared to polygyny, polyandry, or polyamory. The term is applied to the social behavior of some animals. It is important to have an understanding of the nomenclature of monogamy because scientists use the term monogamy for different relationships. Biologists, biological anthropologists, and behavioral ecologists often use the term monogamy in the sense of sexual, if not genetic, modern biological researchers, using the theory of evolution, approach human monogamy as the same in human and non-human animal species. They postulate the following four aspects of monogamy, Marital monogamy refers to marriages of two people. Social monogamy refers to two living together, having sex with each other, and cooperating in acquiring basic resources such as shelter, food. Sexual monogamy refers to two partners remaining sexually exclusive with other and having no outside sex partners. Genetic monogamy refers to sexually monogamous relationships with genetic evidence of paternity, when cultural or social anthropologists and other social scientists use the term monogamy, the meaning is social or marital monogamy. There are also philosophical aspects in the field of interest of e. g. philosophical anthropology and philosophy of religion, the word monogamy comes from the Greek μονός, monos which means alone, and γάμος, gamos which means marriage. According to the Ethnographic Atlas, of 1,231 societies from around the noted,186 were monogamous,453 had occasional polygyny,588 had more frequent polygyny. Many societies that we consider monogamous in fact allow easy divorce, in many western countries divorce rates approach 50%. Those who remarry do so on average 3 times, divorce and remarriage can thus result in serial monogamy, i. e. multiple marriages but only one legal spouse at a time. In all, these account for 16 to 24% of the monogamous category, the prevalence of sexual monogamy can be roughly estimated as the percentage of married people who do not engage in extramarital sex. The Standard Cross-Cultural Sample describes the amount of sex by men and women in over 50 pre-industrial cultures. The amount of sex by men is described as universal in 6 cultures, moderate in 29 cultures, occasional in 6 cultures. The amount of sex by women is described as universal in 6 cultures, moderate in 23 cultures, occasional in 9 cultures. These findings support the claim that the amount of extramarital sex differs across cultures. Recent surveys conducted in non-Western nations have found cultural and gender differences in extramarital sex
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Territory (animal)
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In ethology, territory is the sociographical area that an animal of a particular species consistently defends against conspecifics. Animals that defend territories in this way are referred to as territorial, territoriality is only shown by a minority of species. More commonly, an individual or a group of animals has an area that it habitually uses but does not necessarily defend, this is called the home range. The home ranges of different groups of animals often overlap, or in the overlap areas, within the home range there may be a core area that no other individual group uses, but, again, this is as a result of avoidance. The ultimate function of animals inhabiting and defending a territory is to increase the fitness or inclusive fitness of the animals expressing the behaviour. Fitness in this biological sense relates to the ability of an animal to survive, the proximate functions of territory defense vary. For some animals, the reason for such behaviour is to acquire and protect food sources, nesting sites, mating areas. Territories have been classified as six types, Type A, An all-purpose territory in which all activities occur, e. g. courtship, mating, nesting and foraging Type B, A mating and nesting territory, not including most of the area used for foraging. Type C, A nesting territory which includes the nest plus an area around it. Type D, A pairing and mating territory, the type of territory defended by males in lekking species. Type F, Winter territory which typically includes foraging areas and roost sites, may be equivalent to the Type A territory, or for a migratory species, may be on the wintering grounds. Reports of territory size can be confused by a lack of distinction between home range and the defended territory, the size and shape of a territory can vary according to its purpose, season, the amount and quality of resources it contains, or the geography. The size is usually a compromise of resource needs, defense costs, predation pressure, some species of squirrels may claim as much as 10 hectares of territory. For European badgers, a home range may be as small as 30 hectares in a rural habitat. On average, a territory may be approximately 50 hectares, with main setts normally at least 500 metres apart. In urban areas, territories can be as small as 5 hectares, if they can obtain food from bird tables. Spotted hyenas have highly variable territory sizes, ranging from less than 4,000 hectares in the Ngorongoro Crater to over 100,000 hectares in the Kalahari, sanderlings forage on beaches and sandflats. When on beaches, they feed either in flocks or individual territories of 10 to 120 metres of shoreline, the time to develop territories varies between animals
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Egg incubation
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Incubation refers to the process by which certain oviparous animals hatch their eggs, it also refers to the development of the embryo within the egg. Multiple and various factors are vital to the incubation of various species of animal, in many species of reptile for example, no fixed temperature is necessary, but the actual temperature determines the sex ratio of the offspring. In birds in contrast, the genders of offspring are genetically determined, especially in poultry, the act of sitting on eggs to incubate them is called brooding. A wide range of incubation habits is displayed among birds, the Namaqua sandgrouse of the deserts of southern Africa, needing to keep its eggs cool during the heat of the day, stands over them drooping its wings to shade them. The humidity is also critical, because if the air is too dry the egg will lose too much water to the atmosphere, which can make hatching difficult or impossible. As incubation proceeds, an egg will normally become lighter, in the species that incubate, the work is divided differently between the sexes. Possibly the most common pattern is that the female all the incubation, as in the coscoroba swan. In some species, such as the crane, the male. In others, such as the cassowaries, only the male incubates, the male mountain plover incubates the females first clutch, but if she lays a second, she incubates it herself. In hoatzins, some birds help their parents incubate later broods, the incubation period, the time from the start of uninterrupted incubation to the emergence of the young, varies from 11 days to 85 days. In these latter, the incubation is interrupted, the longest uninterrupted period is 64 to 67 days in the emperor penguin, in general smaller birds tend to hatch faster, but there are exceptions, and cavity nesting birds tend to have longer incubation periods. It can be a demanding process, with adult albatrosses losing as much as 83 g of body weight a day. Megapode eggs take from 49 to 90 days depending on the mound, even in other birds, ambient temperatures can lead to variation in incubation period. Normally, of course, the egg is incubated outside the body, however, in one recorded case, the egg incubation occurred entirely within a chicken. The chick hatched inside and emerged from its mother without the shell, embryo development remains suspended until the onset of incubation. The freshly laid eggs of fowl, ostrich, and several other species can be stored for about two weeks when maintained under 5 C. Extended periods of suspension have been observed in marine birds. Some start to incubate after the last egg of the clutch, incubation periods for birds Very few mammals lay eggs
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"Hoopœ". Collier's New Encyclopedia. 1921.
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