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Qilong — The Turtle and the Parrot
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Published: 2011-09-26 09:07:19 +0000 UTC; Views: 1261; Favourites: 20; Downloads: 38
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Description
Here we have the lower jaws of two beaked animals, a turtle (the Loggerhead Caretta caretta, a sea turtle, and a member of the cryptodire side of living turtledom) and a parrot (the Yellow-Crowned Amazon Amazona ochrocephala, a psittacid and thus an \"ordinary\" psittaciform, unlike the macaws and lories, which have different jaw morphologies).The jaws are shown in side and top views without and with the beak (or rhamphotheca), where in the last you see the jaw in views with only the outline to show its shape and thus relation to the underlying bone.
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Comments: 8
Wow I never knew how sharp a turtles lower beak was before this.
The top jaw is the turtle right?
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Yes. I tried to not directly point to it in the description, and used the phrasing ("turtle" before "parrot") to allow the reader to progress from one section to the next. I forgot to omit the lettering, as that leads to a more "technical" view.
The "sharpness" of the beak in lateral view is sort of misleading: in both animals, the beak is relatively rounded along the rim, although it does have a sharpened rim (or tomial margin) for cutting.
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How are Macaws and 'true' parrots different from one another?
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Macaws, especially ones like Ara, have much more robust jaws and typically thicker rhamphotheca. The "nail" or hook of the upper rostrum is also typically larger. I was also putting the term "ordinary" in quotations to emphasize the general conservative aspect of Amazons.
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Oh, I see what you mean. It's not that the macaw morphology is some how radically different, just that it's more adapted than that of the amazons.
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Excellent work; thank you!
I have always wanted to see something like this in relation to beaks, claws, or horns.
That keratinous tissue doesn't readily fossilize and they play such a huge role in an animal's lifestyle. It's nice to be able to view the 'mechanics' behind it.
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The rhamphotheca in both animals have some distinct morphologies that are different from the bone underneath, and I realized that to show this distinction, I would need to do this. This is, of course, far from the whole series, but it's a good start, and if you look closely, you will see where I hint at and allude to strange shapes and structures in the bone and keratin. I won't explain it just yet, though.
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