Weak

This post, and me.

Me: I have something.  Don't know if it's a cold or an allergy, but basically my nose has been dripping nonstop for a day now, my eyes are red, and I'm all bleary and stuff.  Bah.

This post: I'm reaching.  Did a post over at the Fistful today.  I don't think that counts towards my post-a-day here, but if you can't get enough of my deathless prose, there you go.

Also found a cool description of a visit to the Yezidi Kurds, from Christian Garbis' blog.  No, I don't think that counts either, but it's neat. 

Yezidis are Armenia's largest remaining minority; there are maybe 50,000 of them, or just under 2% of the population.  We've driven past those villages, and we've seen Yezidi herdsmen on the slopes of Mt. Aragats, but I don't think I've ever talked to a Yezidi.

(Mike Ralls had an interesting suggestion the other day: since we know that we have just five or six months left, maybe we should make a list of "things to do before leaving Armenia".  Claude?)

Okay, let's see... oh!  The contract thing from the other day, where we'd have to change back to doing stuff from a year ago?  Resolved.  That's really good.  There are a pile of other contract issues out there, some of which may be as bad or worse, but that one is done.  Phew.

Hey, did you know that pterodactyls had hair?  You did.  Okay, well, there's a whole story there.  Because some people were saying no, that wasn't hair!  It was internal fibers.  Or a taphonomic artifact -- the "hairs" were really collagen fibers in scales, that survived after the scales decayed away.  (Apparently a few modern reptiles show something like this.) 

So there was a lot of careful re-examination of pterosaur fossils.  And at the end a consensus emerged: hair.  And more.  It turns out that, one, a lot of different pterosaurs seem to have had hair -- maybe even a majority of them.  And two, it wasn't exactly hair.  It was fibers that were hairlike, but not homologous to mammalian hair.  Not "hair" any more than the fuzz on a caterpillar is hair.  More like super-long, thin, flexible scales.  One researcher used the word "hairoid". 

Not a lot more to add, but come on -- hairoid.  You have to love that.  (And h/t to Darren Naish, who explained this to me in an e-mail.)

Okay, I'm fading fast here.  Um.  Armenia has found their Eurovision rep!  Her name is Sirusho and she's twenty years old.  You can find a sample YouTube here for her song "Yes Sirum Em Kez", which if you were paying attention to the grammar lesson you'll remember means "I Love Kez".  (Okay, actually it means "I Love You", which you have to agree is a pretty clever name for a pop song.  In Eurovision terms?  I'm seeing some real potential here.)

All right.  Home, hot tea, bed.  Talk amongst yourselves.

Comments

[The New York City High School Math Teacher]

Feel better - I have a nasty catarrh and the prospect of extended baking in the PM. And the sponge isn't fermenting yet. Oy.

I love the fact that, in an informal survey of my students, cabrito wins out over turkey. Happy Thanksgiving.

[Will Baird]

Did I know pterosaurs had hair? hmmm. What do you think? ;)

Actually, I recommend Unwin's book on them. It's quite good. One of the many nifty tidbits out of it was that they've deduced that pterosaurs were ready to fly right out of the egg and that many of the fossils found up in Germany that were thought to be separate species turn out to be just different ages for the same one. The implications of what this might mean for parenting are pretty big: the classic view of the pteranodon returning with something to the nest to feed its chicks is probably all wrong.

Pterosaurs were definitely not birds and they seem to be something rather unique behaviorally and physiologically.

Which is just pretty darned kewl. too bad none survived the KT. Alas.

[Bernard Guerrero]

Will,

What's the best theory at the moment on why the birds made it and the Pterosaurs didn't?

[Will Baird]

oh gosh, glad I decided to go back and look for this thread. Sorry about the late post, Bernard.

It appears to be size. Or as I have kidnapped from Darren Naish, metabolic requirements: the pterosaurs needed more nutrition than could be found at the KT Boundary because they were so big. It looks like the birds captured all the small flier niches as far as we can tell from the pterosaurs. By the KT Extinction, as I understand, the pterosaurs were only the bigguns and they starved after the fact.

For a long time, it was thought that the requirements were to be smaller than a certain size to survive the KT. That isn't the case. There were VERY large terrestrial crocodilians - as well as the water going variety - that seem to have survived that violate the size limitation. If you realize that crocs, even possibly terrstrial ones, require less food than a smaller warm blooded animal, it starts making sense.

Tangentially, the funny part is that if Unwin is right, the pterosaurs were actually even better fliers than birds, energy efficiency wise. That makes you wonder why the birds captured the smaller flier niches from the pterosaurs. WAG: birds are better walkers than the pterosaurs ever were.