SCFZ

Extrapolating from emus and ostriches, Herculano-Houzel estimated the T. rex’s cerebrum had as many as 3 billion neurons, comparable to a baboon’s brain. Another terrifying carnivorous dinosaur called the Alioramus, meanwhile, had over 1 billion, similar to a capuchin monkey.

If the T. rex’s cognition approached that of a baboon’s, the dinosaur may have been capable of using tools and passing down knowledge through generations, Herculano-Houzel said.

“The overall study is an important step in understanding the evolution of the structure and function of the modern bird brain,” said Amy Balanoff, an evolutionary biologist at Johns Hopkins University not involved in the study.

Other research that chips away at the childhood image of the T. rex as a scaly, solitary monster involves mass burial sites found in Utah, Montana and elsewhere, suggesting the carnivores moved in groups like wolves. The remains of other male theropods have been found guarding clutches of eggs, a social behavior seen in modern birds.

Paleontologists even suspect tyrannosauruses had feathers — and are hunting for the fossil evidence.

The countryside.
Birds are whistling.
And birdhouse will make a bird's life a lot more comfortable.

https://youtu.be/tXMKw5dkm4s

A stork attacks cars in Slovakia, damaging six of them

He considers his own image on the shiny hood of the car to be an intruder and tries to shoo it away with his beak. This is how the stork behaves in the Slovak village of Černina u Humenného in eastern Slovakia.



Residents are desperate because the stork has already damaged six cars in this way. "The damage is five thousand euros, the whole car needs to be resprayed. I pay for additional insurance, but they have refused me so far. I filed an appeal," Martin Čirák, whose car was damaged by a stork, told Joj TV.

"He's a provocateur stork. He walks around the village and does what he wants," said another victim, Matej Krivda. "Anything that mirrors its image, it perceives as a rival and tries to drive it out of the area," explained the stork's behavior, Anna Macková from the administration of the Eastern Carpathians protected landscape area. "It's the stork's reaction when it's nesting and needs to protect its territory from foreign storks so they don't eat its food," added stork expert Miroslav Fulín.

Conservationists advised residents to park their cars in the garage, or at least cover them with a tarp. When the little ones are born, the situation should be resolved. "The stork will be looking for food and won't be busy bouncing on cars," added Macková. "Let's hope he will come to his senses, taking care of his family and not damaging cars," concluded the mayor of the village, Silvia Žinčáková.

The three scenes on this page chart how feather-workers prepared their their materials and created images. In the top one, a feather-worker stands outside, in a European-style patio as he dyes feathers in a caldron. In the center scene, a feather-worker lifts up a cotton fabric with feathers attached. According to the Nahuatl text, these feathers have been hardened with glue. Once the feathers are dry, the maguey-fiber support can be removed from the cotton fabric. At the bottom, a feather-worker applies the final touches to his imagery. The works he has created, a decorative design and image of a saint, make explicit an extraordinary shift in the 16th century. Now feather-working techniques are used to create European images. At the bottom of the scene, adjacent to the image of the saint is a tiny circle, a pre-Hispanic-style glyph representing an eye. In Aztec pictorial language, eye glyphs were used to represent shiny, glistening and sparkling objects, like stars in the night sky and spectacular feather-paintings. The outfits worn by these feather workers parallel those depicted in European woodcuts. Such woodcuts were likely used as models for these images. The text, written in Nahuatl, describes how feather-workers created images in pre-Hispanic times. The top of the page gives the chapter name in Spanish and on other folios a Spanish account of feather-working also appears. This is, then, a bilingual work.