(Look, there's one now! Curse the little blighter!)I've been out for a while (Disney World! Whoo!), and as such have not been able to post much on my blog. Two interesting things have happened recently occurred in the world of tyrant paleozoology. The first is a pubis (a hip bone) from a tyrannosauroid found in the Early Cretaceous of Dinosaur Cove, Australia.
This is the very same place where Leaellynasaura and the famous "dwarf allosaur" (now known to be a neovenatorid) were found. The bone is not enough to be considered diagnostic, so I applaud those who described it for not slapping it with a new name. (And I do mean you, Santanaraptor.) This is interesting, as before this find, tyrant dinosaurs are known only from the Laurasian continents of North America, Asia, and Europe. Does this mean that other tyrants might soon be found in India? Madagascar and Africa? South America? Who knows, maybe even Antarctica!
Second is the first tyrant known from Russia, a small tyrannosauroid named Kileskus aristotocus, from the Middle Jurassic of Western Siberia. Russia is notably sparse in dinosaur fossils, though many have been found in the Amur River Valley and in not-too-distant Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The animal is known from some premaxillary bones and other cranial elements, and is assumed to be a more basal relative of the Proceratosauridae and others.
And, to the main point of this little post... The American white ibis. Eudocimus albus. While at Disney World's Animal Kingdom, I leaned in to say "Hello!" to one of these small birds, and it snapped at me! Only my expert ninja skills (screaming like a girl and falling over) prevented me from sustaining a bruised nose. I can conclude that the bird was probably startled by the loud noise, and indeed, I'll have to remember not to bother any avians in the future.
Clearly the birds still contain predatory instincts from their dinosaur ancestors, among which are the hunting habits of birds of prey and extinct terror birds. Anyone who doubts me can go to Disney and try being friendly to an ibis.
