Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks. Just ask the family
of Captain Jennifer Cassidy, whose snowbird jet has crashed in Kamloops, B.C.,
this weekend, as she was promoting unity and the like in the face of COVID-19...
Her fellow pilot survived, (albeit breaking both legs in the process), and she did
not. What, how and when it all went wrong – it will be up to the investigators
to, well, uncover, and for the rest of us – to just wonder about it all…
If we get away from the real life… well, I suppose that
Netflix’s ‘She-Ra and the Princesses of Power’ (2018 onwards, until now, if I
understand correctly), deserve an honorable mention as a good reboot of a 80s’
franchise. Yes, the show has flaws – it cannot quite figure out as to just who
its’ target audience is – more mature people or the more childish ones,
(age-wise), and the characters’ depictions are affected by this indecisiveness;
in particular, Adora, (as Adora and not as She-Ra), comes across almost
androgynous, which isn’t for everyone’s liking. Ah well, Netflix’s ‘She-Ra’ is
wrapping-up and Netflix is promising us a slew of new movies, series, and
seasons. Good for them!
…Getting back to real life, let us talk about quetzals. Many
people, even those that do not deal with biology, ornithology, and the rest of
life sciences, may’ve heard of the quetzal, as it is the national bird, (and
also the national currency) of Guatemala, (which is a country in Central
America, next to Mexico, if anyone cares. Cough, USA, cough). More
particularly, though, the bird in question is the so-called resplendent
quetzal, Pharomachrus mocinno, and
for most people, it is the original bird that is called so.
In reality, however, there are six species of the quetzal
birds these days. Five of them belong to the aforementioned genus Pharomachrus, while the sixth species,
the eared quetzal of Mexico, and (slightly) the southwestern U.S., belongs to
the monotypic genus Euptilotus
instead, because of some differences, according to scientists that deal with
birds and their classification.
This brings us to classification, because of course I like
to talk about it. All of the quetzals, regardless of which genera they belong
to, are a part of the Trogoniformes’
order of birds, which includes both the quetzals and the trogons. Both of those
avian varieties look similar to each other, in no small part because they all
belong to the same bird family, Trogonidae,
differing only on the level of genera.
Contrary to the popular belief, influenced
by the quetzals, the Trogoniform birds are found not only in the American
tropics, but in the African and Asian ones as well. How this state of affairs
came to be is anyone’s guess, seeing how for such an old order, (Trogoniform
birds appeared in the Eocene epoch, 49 MYA, almost at the very beginning of the
Cenozoic era), it is still very vague as to how their true relatives are. Some
scientists claim that the Trogoniforms are related to the Coraciiforms, an
avian order that includes the kingfishers, the bee-eaters, the rollers, the
motmots, and other small birds, some tropical, some otherwise, some obscure,
some well-known… Other scientists claim that the trogons and quetzals are
related to the owls and the mousebirds instead. Owls are well-known by
everyone, whereas the mousebirds are two genera and six species of birds,
(family Coliidae, order Coliiformes) that is currently considered to be a
sister group to the aforementioned trogons and quetzals, as well as several
other birds that make-up the Eucavitaves clade instead.
Physically, the mousebirds are like the anti-trogons and
quetzals, who are colored very brightly, almost as bright as the parrots are,
whereas the mousebirds’ plumage is grey, or brown – mousy in color, really. The
mousebirds live in sub-Saharan Africa and nowhere else, though in the past,
(and the mousebirds have appeared back in the early Paleocene, even before the
trogons and quetzals did), this situation had been different, potential fossils
of the prehistoric mousebirds were found on other continents, including Europe…
…Well, for now this is it. See you all soon!
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