skellingtons

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Theropods to Birds is my new dino class.  Week 1 is on bird anatomy.  Birds are not like us.  In many ways.  Do you remember that I was gobsmacked, in Dino 101, to learn that birds breathe in a completely different way from mammals? 


Strange and curious.  Birds keep air all over the place, and a full respiration takes two inhale/exhale cycles.  Who knew............  Birds need to be able to expand their skeleton, in order to breathe.  You can suffocate a bird, by holding it too tightly.............

The "birds breathe" link describes the whole process, with excellent images.  (The above image is part of the story, and [unlike the pics at Foster & Smith Pet Education] this one is ok for me to copy and use here.)



Anyway.  Bird anatomy.

One of the things we were asked to contemplate in Theropods to Birds is the difference between the sternums of cats, and the sternums of flying birds.  (cats have tiny sternums; flying birds have enormous sternums)

In class they gave us some tiny skeleton pics to look at.  I went hunting for better pics.

Wow, did I ever find them!  This page, from the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, has some spectacular skeletons!

I've only looked at the chicken and the cat.  Scroll down, and click on the individual links.  Nice clear pics, nice labels..............

Really excellent!  So grateful to the people at UWLAX who took the time to make this wonderful learning resource available to all of us!  I wrote them a mash note.  I bet it went to the people who put up the web page.  I mean it for them, as well as the people who did the work on the skeletons, and the people who took the pics and got them ready for the web........  I hope the web people will share it with the biologists.


Speaking of why we love modern times, the www is surely a big reason!  All of this excellent info, available at the click of a few buttons............. 

This is a great time and place for a curious person to be alive.

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