Table of Contents
The Avian Complex, October 1 2007 (incomplete)
The Avian Complex
There is some indefinable trait that separates the birds, the mammals, the reptiles and all the other dæmon forms. The most common dæmon forms are mammalian -- suggesting an affinity among humans with members of their own class, or alternatively an evolutionary similarity in the personality-behaviour correlation, but that is a topic for a different essay -- followed by avians and more conventional reptiles, if you take TDF to be a small-scale model of the world. Why are avian people rarer than mammals? What are avian people really?
Let's start with what avians are. This is a very interesting topic; birds have been disputed and theoretically refuted many times. Taxonomically speaking they are vertebrates, chordates of the kingdom Animalia, and a kind of warm-blooded, egg-laying reptile. The most accurate description is that birds have feathers; that is to say, all birds have feathers, and all things that are not birds have feathers. Their other traits are shared by past and present species -- a bipedal design, rear-facing talons on the feet, beaks, hollow bones, egg-laying and so on. It is fair to say, however, that all birds lay eggs and have beaks, just not as helpful as "all birds have feathers". The skull design varies as much as it does for mammals, as does the general habits, like flight, nesting and courting.
Simplistic designs in some birds represent a throwback to the dinosaurs; the wing-claws of hoatzins, the structure of chickens and so on. Some birds are more like dinosaurs than the modern true reptiles. But birds are highly evolved highly specialized, and have achieved a unique and vital place in the world. There are roughly 10, 000 species of living or recently extinct birds today, compared to around 5, 400 mammals.
What is it about bird-dæmians that differentiate them from mammals so clearly?
To Be Continued