hoatzins

But if you’re only familiar with the view of bird classification presented in textbooks and so on, the idea that cariamaens might be close to such things as hoatzins is pretty surprising, as the former have conventionally been regarded as part of Gruiformes, the group that includes rails, cranes, trumpeters and several other groups.

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

But if you’re only familiar with the view of bird classification presented in textbooks and so on, the idea that cariamaens might be close to such things as hoatzins is pretty surprising, as the former have conventionally been regarded as part of Gruiformes, the group that includes rails, cranes, trumpeters and several other groups.

Archive 2006-11-01 Darren Naish 2006

I read Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord when I was seventeen, and by the next year I was standing on the bank of the Amazon, still lost in that book (and fishing for catfish and little pan-sized piranhas, and hunting hoatzins (a big bird) with a 28 gauge shogun with brass shells that you reloaded after every shot.)

Brokeback Tree Stand Dave Hurteau 2008

Worth noting is that, while there are two fossil hoatzins, neither of them preserve enough information to tell us anything useful about hoatzin affinities, or about the way of life of the fossil forms.

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

Finally, there might be a hitherto overlooked metavian clade at the base of Neoaves: it includes such strange bedfellows as nightjars and other nightbirds, swifts and hummingbirds, kagus, pigeons, sandgrouse, flamingos and grebes, mesites, hoatzins and tropicbirds.

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

Seriemas were without close relatives and were the most basal group within Neoaves (the neognath clade that excludes waterfowl and gamebirds), bustards [see adjacent image] were on their own and near the middle of the neoavian radiation, trumpeters, cranes and limpkins grouped with hoatzins in a clade that also included flamingos, tubenosed seabirds, divers and penguins, and rails and finfoots were members of a ‘higher landbird’ clade.

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

I remember something even more striking: hoatzins would be basal to this clade!

Terror birds Darren Naish 2006

Mourer-Chauviré (1983) regarded idiornithids as similar to both seriemas and hoatzins and her conclusions are similar overall to those of Olson (1985).

Giant hoatzins of doom Darren Naish 2006

Isn't Cariamae itself based on the same kinds of characters that apparently incorrectly unite seriemas with hoatzins, cuckoos and turacos?

Goodbye, my giant predatory, cursorial, flightless hoatzin Darren Naish 2006

Among the most enigmatic of Cenozoic fossil birds is Foro panarium (image at left) from the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming: it seems to combine features of hoatzins, cuckoos and turacos but, interestingly, is also superficially raptor-like.

Giant hoatzins of doom Darren Naish 2006