THE LINNAEAN SOCIETY OF NEW YORK SPEAKERS PROGRAM
Tuesday, Sept. 28, 2010, 7:30 p.m. The American Museum of Natural History, Linder Theater Speaker: Richard Schodde, former Curator and Director of the Australian National Wildlife Collection Subject: Australasia--The End or the Beginning of Modern Birdlife Australasia, the global antipodes, has some of the most unusual birds in the world: flightless emus and kiwis, swans that are black, fowls that build incubators for hatching eggs, a raft of parrots and cockatoos, and lyrebirds, bowerbirds and birds-of-paradise of exquisite plumage and remarkable display. Yet many of its birds, particularly its songbirds, are of conventional form, like the thrushes, warblers, wrens and flycatchers of the northern hemisphere. So it was thought throughout almost the whole 20th century that Australasia, originally an avian vacuum, was colonized in waves by immigrant Eurasian bird stocks over the last 5-10 million years. Those that arrived first diverged the most, isolated by sea from the rest of the world. For them it was the end of the line on land. Recent fossil, biogeographic and molecular evidence now suggests that the opposite is true. The growing body of data indicates that Australasia, as part of the ancient southern supercontinent Gondwana, was the source of many of todayĆ¢?Ts modern groups of birds, not just emus and parrots, but also the songbirds, today the largest and most successful ordinal group of birds in the world. The talk will trace the development of these ideas and the evidence on which they are based, and explain why most of the root lineages of songbird evolution survive today in the montane rainforests of New Guinea. Richard Schodde received his Ph.D. in 1970 from the University of Adelaide. He is the author or coauthor of numerous scientific papers and books including The Encyclopedia of Birds. A Complete Visual Guide (with Fred Cooke) published in 2006. In 2009 Schodde was awarded a Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM) for his contribution to the natural sciences, particularly ornithology. The meeting is open to the public, without charge. Please join us for what promises to be a very exciting talk. Enter the Museum at West 77th Street. If you would like to meet Dr. Schodde prior to the talk, join us at Pappardella's Restaurant, 75th Street and Columbus Avenue at 6 p.m. The reservation will be in the name of Alice. Alice Deutsch, Vice President -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html 3) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --