Definitions
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
- n. Either of two cranelike birds (Cariama cristata or Chunga burmeisteri) of southern South America, having a tuftlike crest at the base of the bill and living mostly on land where they feed on snakes, worms, and insects.
Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. A remarkable South American bird, whose name is as unsettled in orthography as is its position in the ornithological system. It is usually regarded as grallatorial, and related to the cranes, but sometimes placed with the birds of prey, next to the African secretary bird, which it resembles in some respects. It is 3 feet long; the wing 15 inches, the tail 13, the tarsus 7½ the legs are bare above the suffrago; the head is crested with a frontal egret; the bill is red; the bare orbit bluish; the iris yellow; the plumage is dark, but somewhat variegated with lighter colors, and the tail is tipped with white. The seriema inhabits the campos of Brazil and northern Paraguay, and may be domesticated. For its technical names, see
Cariama and Cariamidæ.
Wiktionary
- n. Either of two species of bird in the family Cariamidae, endemic to South America.
GNU Webster's 1913
- n. (Zoöl.) either of two large South American birds related to the cranes, the
cariama of Southern Brazil (Cariama cristata, formerly Dicholophus cristata) or the Chunga burmeisteri of Argentina. They have an erectile crest and a short, broad bill. They are often domesticated.
WordNet 3.0
- n. Brazilian Cariama; sole representative of the genus Cariama
- n. Argentinian Cariama
Etymologies
- Native name. (Wiktionary)
- Spanish, from Tupi sariema. (American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition)
Examples
“Some of the most distinctive birds in the hotspot include two very large species, the rhea (Rhea americana) and the red-legged seriema (Cariama cristata), neither of which are endemic.”
“The seriema-hoatzin clade was closely allied with a cuckoo-turaco clade.”
“Tonni & Tambussi (1988) described the foot morphology of the Miocene psilopterine Psilopterus and showed that its foot claws were nearly identical to those of the living seriema Cariama cristata.”
More on phorusrhacids: the biggest, the fastest, the mostest out-of-placest
“The two living seriema species are South American, but members of similar, closely related groups (the bathornithids and idiornithids) inhabited North America from the Eocene to the Miocene and Europe from the Eocene to the Oligocene.”
“Red-legged seriema (Cariama cristata) of the Cerrado grasslands of central Brazil.”
“The seriema is sort of the South American equivalent of Africa's Secretary Bird.”
“Unless there has been some revolution in higher-level avian cladistics I've been completely ignorant of, the seriema is considered a fairly close relative of these magnificent predators.”
“Miller and one of the dogs caught a seriema, a big, long-legged, bustardlike bird, in rather a curious way.”
“They also developed models of two living species for comparison - an eagle, as well as the terror bird's closest living relative, a South American bird known as the seriema.”
“To see how strong the terror bird's bite might have been, the researchers worked with zookeepers at the La Plata Zoo to get a seriema and an eagle to chomp down on their bite meter.”
Lists
These user-created lists contain the word ‘seriema’.
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WWF WTF?
Ever play "Words With Friends" with someone and they throw down some strange, unlikely group of letters that makes even the most mild and squeaky clean tongued person say "whiskey tango foxtrot"? ...
oorie, sangar, merl, cwm, doum, weir, jura, invar, lawine, tapa, waw, shog and 376 more...
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birds
birds with singular names from
at least 9 English dictionariesaasvogel, aberdevine, accentor, accipiter, aepyornis, agami, albatross, alcatras, alcid, alcidine, amadavat, amokura and 1056 more...
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Learned (or Encountered) in Reading
I have a list for words learned from Newsweek; here's where I keep all the stuff from other shit I read.
Except when I'm looking stuff up and find new words that way. Those go on their...cellie, laminectomy, mridangam, terroir, hypospadias, crus, corpora cavernosa, crura, uretheral meatus, bartholin's gland, coloquintida, colopexy and 921 more...
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Still More Bird Wirds
A work in progress....Birds from around the world (other than endemic to North America).
barbet, hornbill, trogon, bee-eater, bristlehead, wren-babbler, stubtail, blackeye, bush warbler, cassowary, bowerbird, bird-of-paradise and 722 more...
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qreen-tailed
in the Century Dictionary definition of 'menhaden' there is a misprint - I speculate- o 'qreen-tailed'for green-tailed. BUT there are alot of odd-tails out there..............
uropygium, hypural, nudicaudate, plesiosaur, macrural, curvicaudate, homocercal, jabiru, xeme, sirenian, dugong, saururaceae and 56 more...
Tweets
Looking for tweets for seriema.
chained_bear "The sole extant member of the small and ancient family Cariamidae, which is also the sole surviving family of the Cariamae." So saith Wikipedia. Apr 28, 2009