Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
Apart from legend it is a matter of reasonable certitude that the Maoris brought tattooing with them from Polynesia. Their marking instruments were virtually the same as those of their tropical cousins; both, for instance, before the iron age of the nineteenth century, often used the wing-bones of sea-birds to make their tiny chisels.
In New Zealand very large bones of an extinct bird have been found, but the most remarkable remains have been discovered in Germany of a bird which has been given the name of "Lizard-tailed," because it has a tail with vertebrae, from each joint of which feathers spring. Three claws are attached to the ends of the wing-bones, like the single claw of the bat.
It is curiously uncertain and irregular in its action. It thickens ducks' leg-bones while allowing them to shorten. It shortens the disused wing-bones of ducks and the leg-bones of rabbits while allowing them to thicken; and yet in other cases it greatly reduces the thickness of bones without shortening them. It transmits tameness most powerfully in an animal which usually cannot acquire it.
All day the saloon and various cabins smelt very fishy by reason of the operations connected with the dissecting and cleaning of the several parts of the albatross. One was making a pipe-stem out of one of the long wing-bones. Another was making a tobacco pouch out of the large feet of the bird. The doctor's cabin was like a butcher's shop in these bird-catching times.
Slender bodies, too, and the lessened divergence of the furculum, would slightly diminish the spread of the wings, and so would affect the measurements taken. As the wing-bones, moreover, are to some extent correlated with the beak and the feet, the artificial selection of shortened beaks might tend to shorten the wing as well as the feet.
Independently of shortening, the disused wing-bones have actually thickened or increased in weight. In the Aylesbury duck the disproportion caused by these conflicting changes is so great that the wing-bones are 47 per cent. heavier than they should be if their weight had varied proportionally with their length.
The reduction in weight on which Darwin relies seems to be entirely due to the shortening, and this shortening appears to be irrelevant to disuse, since the wings of the Call duck are similarly shortened in their proportions by 12 per cent., although this bird habitually flies to such an extent that Darwin partly attributes the greatly increased weight of its wing-bones to increased use under domestication.
The shortening is about 6 per cent. more than in the shortened legs, and it amounts to 11 per cent. as compared with the weight of the skeleton. Such a shortening should represent a reduction of 29 per cent. in weight, whereas the actual reduction in the weight of the wing-bones relatively to the weight of the skeleton is only 9 per cent. even in the breeds that never fly.
It was surprising how beautifully clean everything came away, so that when the fleshy side of the skin had been brushed over with moistened arsenical soap, the wing-bones tied together, the hollow of the skull and orbits of the eyes filled up with cotton-wool, and a ball of the same placed for the body, the skin being turned back over all and slightly shaken, a stranger would hardly have known that the flesh of the bird had been removed.
You pick up the skeleton of a bird upon a moor; and if you know anything about osteology the science of bones you will see, in the very make of its breast-bone and its wing-bones, the declaration that its destiny was to soar into the blue.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking