Sentences with phrase «beak by»

Here, they sit, beak by beak, in the holly tree.

Brainy New Caledonian crows have figured out how to carry objects too large to move with their beaks by using a stick

Not exact matches

You can try to do this nicely — say, by sneaking up on the ducks in the middle of the night, whisking their little goose - down pillows from beneath their sleeping heads and pressing them down on their beaks before they even know what hit them — but it's quite illegal.

Characterized by sharp beaks and flamboyant horns and frills, these herbivores almost all lived in what is now Western North America right at the end of the Cretaceous period, 100 to 66 million years ago.

CMI has a daily blog, which is why I beak this out by day.

And because the underlying commitment is philosophical, the flimsiest facts are counted as evidence - as when the president of the National Academy of Sciences recently published an article arguing that evolution is confirmed by differences in the size of finch beaks, as though the sprawling evolutionary drama from biochemicals to the human brain could rest on instances of trivial, limited variation.

22 First by a Beak As if to prove once and for all that betting is for the birds, a pigeon wins at New Orleans» Fair Grounds

However, it is bad form for a roller to «twizzle» by trying to touch its tail feathers with its beak.

He concluded that the finches the beaks had evolved over time by the characteristics being passed through generations that made more suited to their food sources.

She'll treat everything from mice to cattle; ducks with broken beaks and horses with sore hooves (the goose and rabbit are both made by Hansa - we love their realistic looked animals).

Its exact causes are still uncertain, but its growth may be spurred by the irritation created by indigestible elements in the foods eaten by the whales, such as the beaks of cuttlefish, which are almost invariably found in ambergris.

The Chicken Healthy Weight Small Breed variety includes deboned chicken, chicken meal, and turkey meal — no animal by - products like beaks.

To extract tasty insects from crevices, they craft a selection of hooks and long, barbed tapers called stepped - cut tools, made by intricately cutting a pandanus leaf with their beaks.

«This is borne out by the fact that Hesperonis — discovered by Othniel Charles Marsh of the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History — which is a near relative of modern birds that still retains teeth and the most primitive stem avian with a modernized beak in the form of fused, elongate premaxillae, also possesses a modern bird palatine bone,» he said.

They isolated the importance of temperature by studying only female beak length and comparing species with similar diets living in different climates.

It is the horror of every nature walker to come upon the disgusting aftermath of this plunder — two knobby owl legs suspended from a tree limb, a beak and feathers on the woodland floor, the forest serenity shattered by the belches of satiated slugs.

Recent research by Thomas Bungyar and Simone Pika showed that ravens, much like human beings, communicate by pointing, using their wings and beaks.

Andrew Gallup at Binghamton University in New York watched 21 budgies over 15 days and counted their yawns — a wide open beak and slightly closed eyes, followed by a brief stretch of the neck.

They died, but medium ground finches with small beaks survived by eating small seeds.

Small beak variants of HMGA2 aren't new changes brought on by the drought, Andersson says.

The specimen studied by Longrich was too incomplete to identify the exact species accurately, but showed a strange twist to the jaw, causing the teeth to curve downward and outwards in a beak shape.

Adding vitamin A alone did not induce extra beaks, nor did adding sonic hedgehog, a protein influenced by retinoic acid.

Working with DNA samples collected by the Grants, researchers at Uppsala identified the gene that influences beak shape by comparing the genomes of 120 birds, all members of the 15 species known as «Darwin's finches.»

The results of a series of autopsies of beached whales carried out by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) have led veterinarians to conclude that sperm whales and beaked whales have little chance of survival if they become stranded.

The work and later experiments supported a 2009 idea proposed by Marcucio that the activity of another gene, SHH (called sonic hedgehog), was critical for forming the beak.

Back in the lab, the ecologists counted up the attacks by different predators — they can tell the nick of a bird's beak from the teeth marks of a mouse or the paired piercings of ant, for example.

For instance, the long - beaked echidna, a spiny, egg - laying mammal, is known from only a single specimen collected in 1961 by a Dutch researcher in Indonesia's Papua Province.

Some ingenious Shark Bay dolphin figured out that by prodding the sediments with a sponge attached to its beak, it could stir up these swim bladder-less fish without hurting itself.

Indeed, a key study of the beaks of these birds, which Charles Darwin so famously described in The Voyage of the Beagle, was carried out in 1938 by careful examination of the New York bird collection.

The iconic myth is that Darwin became an evolutionist in the Galpagos when he discovered natural selection operating on finch beaks and tortoise carapaces, each species uniquely adapted by food type or island ecology.

Beauty and the Beak: How Science, Technology and a 3D - Printed Beak Rescued a Bald Eagle, by Deborah Lee Rose and Jane Veltkamp.

By careful measurements of the population of two species on one tiny island over the course of major weather changes such as El Niño events and droughts, the Grants were able to show that evolutionary changes in beak size and body size can occur in as little as a couple of years.

«We now know that this increase in beak length, and the difference in beak length between birds in Britain and mainland Europe, is down to genes that have evolved by natural selection.»

The researchers have already started to follow up the study by looking at DNA samples from great tit populations across Europe and their initial evidence suggests that the longer beak genetic variants are specific to the UK.

This led the researchers to think that great tit beaks were evolving by natural selection in British great tits, perhaps in response to the widespread use of bird feeders.

The toads had apparently tried to frighten off the predators by puffing themselves up, and the crow - beak punctures had caused the toads» blood vessels and lungs to rupture.

A related paper published July 3 by the same research team in Biology Letters has shown clear and even stronger responses of Cuvierâ $ ™ s beaked whales to simulated mid-frequency sonar exposures.

This crucial insight was provided by a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, who suggested that graduated materials like the beak could find broad use in medicine and biotechnology.

By better understanding this species» diving behaviors, the scientists hope to solve an ongoing mystery: Why are Cuvier's beaked whales particularly sensitive to military sonar operations?

Third, chemical analyses of the rocks yielded eight amino acids consistent with those found in squid beaks, as well as substances produced only by a mammalian digestive tract.

Human teeth evolved from the same genes that make the bizarre beaked teeth of the pufferfish, according to new research by an international team of scientists.

The shift was driven by competition — because the smaller - beaked finches did not have to compete for larger seeds with another finch species, they were more likely to live to pass on their genes, according to the study in the journal Science.

In 2000, McGowan read a paper by Gavin Hunt, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, on tool use by these crows and he had an insight into the New Caledonian crow's unusual beak.

The finding dovetails nicely with work by the Grants that documents the species» rapid evolution as recently as the 1980s, when a drought affected the bird's food supply and its beak started to become more pointed to accommodate a new diet.

These bizarre plant - eaters with tusks and turtle - like beaks were thought to have gone extinct by the Late Triassic Period, 210 million years ago, when dinosaurs first started to proliferate.

The longest ever recorded dive by a whale was made by a Cuvier's beaked whale.

«Our data show that beak morphology is affected by many genes as is the case for most biological traits.

Changes in the size and form of the beak have enabled different species to utilize different food resources such us insects, seeds, nectar from cactus flowers as well as blood from seabirds, all driven by Darwinian selection.

A team of scientists from Uppsala University and Princeton University, led by Leif Andersson at SciLifeLab in Uppsala, has now shed light on the evolutionary history of Darwin's finches and have identified a gene that explains variation in beak shape within and among species.

Thanks to the data provided by citizen scientists, the researchers were able show that the diversity of bird beaks expanded early in the group's evolutionary history, around the time other dinosaurs died out.