I Swear I Saw A Tumblr Post On Here That Said ‘horses Have Over 4,000 Bones’ And I Don’t Know Where

My understanding of phylogenetics is definitely limited so maybe I'm the one who's been getting it wrong this entire time, but if you haven't done so already would you mind explaining the studies about falcons being part of the Australaves clade? I find a lot of people saying things like "falcons are closely related to parrots" which I feel is a bit misleading, but again I could be wrong. Thanks in advance!

Sure! Australaves is the name given to a clade containing the seriemas, falcons, parrots, and passeriform birds. This group was first discovered by genetic analyses in the mid-2000s. As one might expect, this was a very unexpected finding, because prior to this no one had considered that all of these birds might be closely related to each other. (For example, seriemas were traditionally thought to be more closely related to cranes, falcons were thought to be more closely related to hawks, passeriforms were thought to be more closely related to woodpeckers, and so on.)

However, many more genetic studies on birds have been done since then by different research teams sampling different types of genes, vastly greater amounts of genetic data, and larger numbers of bird species, and Australaves has been consistently supported by nearly all of these. We can be pretty confident at this point that Australaves is a real clade.

Within Australaves, parrots and passeriforms are each other’s closest living relatives, and falcons are most closely related to the clade uniting both of them (which has been given the long name of Psittacopasserae). So it would not be incorrect to say that falcons are closely related to parrots, because parrots are indeed among the closest living relatives that falcons have.

However, I’ve occasionally seen people claim that parrots alone are the closest living relatives of falcons, and that is not correct. Instead, parrots and passeriforms are together the closest living relatives of falcons, and falcons are equally closely related to both (much like how a pair of siblings is equally closely related to their first cousin, instead of the cousin being more closely related to one sibling than to the other). The group containing falcons, parrots, and passeriforms (but not seriemas) has another mouthful of a name, Eufalconimorphae!

Solis Lacus: The Eye of Mars : As telescopes around planet Earth watch, Mars is growing brighter in night skies, approaching its 2020 opposition on October 13. Mars looks like its watching too in this view of the Red Planet from September 22. Mars’ disk is already near its maximum apparent size for earthbound telescopes, less than 1/80th the apparent diameter of a Full Moon. The seasonally shrinking south polar cap is at the bottom and hazy northern clouds are at the top. A circular, dark albedo feature, Solis Lacus (Lake of the Sun), is just below and left of disk center. Surrounded by a light area south of Valles Marineris, Solis Lacus looks like a planet-sized pupil, famously known as The Eye of Mars . Near the turn of the 20th century, astronomer and avid Mars watcher Percival Lowell associated the Eye of Mars with a conjunction of canals he charted in his drawings of the Red Planet. Broad, visible changes in the size and shape of the Eye of Mars are now understood from high resolution surface images to be due to dust transported by winds in the thin Martian atmosphere. via NASA

The Roasted Planet

Can you hear this exoplanet screaming? As the exoplanet known as HD 80606 b approaches its star from an extreme, elliptical orbit, it suffers star-grazing torture that causes howling, supersonic winds and shockwave storms across this world beyond our solar system. Its torturous journey boils its atmosphere to a hellish 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit every 111 days, roasting both its light and dark sides. HD 80606b will never escape this scorching nightmare. Download this free poster in English and Spanish and check out the full Galaxy of Horrors.

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Mountain Bluebird (Sialia currucoides)

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