High-Functioning Bio-Nerd: August 2014

From the Scientific American article.

Birds are really just really tiny dinosaurs... but best not to mention the 'tiny' part, they're pretty touchy about it.

But seriously... pretty much from the beginning of the theropod lineage (even before T-rex and velociraptors), they've been gradually getting smaller (some of them small enough to survive the K-T impact), until we had a chickadee in place of a man-eating colossus. They kept the feathers, discovering they were good for gliding and (eventually) powered flight, and lost the teeth (something had to give).

Here's the Scientific American blog's recap of the paper (pointed out by today's 10,000 Birds post), for those like me who don't have a subscription and aren't at a university any more.

(cross-posted)

After realizing that my original Bander-and-Barista blog had gotten a bit off-topic in the couple of years since I left the field biology scene, I created this one to take its place for more regular-life posts, in addition to the cool science. It was supposed to be a bird banding and sciencey blog full of juicy tidbits and photos. But since the sad day I realized I couldn't afford to only get paid a living wage 6 months of the year, the blog had mostly just been regular daily-life stuff, with the occasional weekend birding outing or monthly trip to the semi-local banding station. I'm also no longer a barista. So. That blog (Bander and Barista) will now be confined to bird-ish things, even if it's just new installments on the banding memoir I'm attempting to write. That, in particular, is exactly what I started that blog for... science and ornithology and field biology and the adventures associated with them. The fact that the events in the memoir happened 6 years ago is the reason it's a memoir and not a blog post. There are even some old LiveJournal posts from that period, and those will also be part of the memoir. Occasional weekend birding outings and monthly trips to the semi-local banding station will still be featured here as well. Especially once we get to autumn and I can stand to be outdoors again. For the moment, the non-relevant posts are still there, but over time (since there are a lot of them) I'll be moving those to this blog, dedicated mostly to the regular life stuff. There will be some cross-over on this blog of stuff posted there, since bird stuff is also life stuff. Because of the cross-over, I'd advise that folks follow one or the other, but not both, if you don't want to deal with duplicate posts on occasion.

Edit: WOW. This is gonna be more effort than I thought. Of the mind-numbing copy/paste variety.

I'm also thinking it might have been easier to do this the other way around and change the name and URL of the original blog. Goddamn it.

Posts from the old blog that will eventually get copied here:

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/07/california-preparations.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/04/omg-game-of-thrones.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/04/its-spring.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/03/the-apartment-actually-feels-like-real.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/02/unpacking-valentines-day-and-dads.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/02/happy-imbloc-paganceltic-festival-of.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/01/dragon-eggs-trunk.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/01/christmas-excitement-part-2.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/01/christmas-excitement-part-1.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2014/01/crafty-projects-update.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2013/12/thanksgiving-and-renfest.html

http://bander-barista.blogspot.com/2013/11/rant.html