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
today’s 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
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