Andrew Christopher Knapp

@knapprew.bsky.social

1391 Followers 291 Following

Stop-and-chat avoider. Lido afficionado. Was once world's youngest person, albeit briefly.

Washington DC humidity: 79% Los Angeles humidity: 87% London humidity: 32%
A pompous buffoon
A turtle dove sitting on a branch in the sunshine
A yellowhammer sitting on a hawthorn bush
David Attenborough in the Canadian Rockies, telling us about the wonderful Burgess Shale
A nightingale serenading, as they are known to do.
FINGRINGHOE
The spine of JZ Young's The Life Of Mammals
A close encounter between a buzzard and a raven in front of a fluffy nimbus cloud
A tree felled by beavers lies in the water at a lake's edge
- Not at all - To some extent - Very much so - Don't know
A face-on view of a taxidermied woodcock. It has a thousand-yard stare, which is pretty accurate.
A beautifully taxidermied female Eurasian woodcock, Scolopax rusticola, in a glass museum display case.
An osprey sits atop a NO SWIMMING sign with a half-eaten fish that has clearly fallen foul of the no swimming rule.
A flock of cattle egrets fly over a hotel swimming pool at dusk, off to roost for the night. Photo courtesy of @samuraipizzakat
A pair of peregrine falcons sit on rusted red railings against a dazzling blue winter sky
A large pot full of home made ragu
Optimum trait values for all traits for three major subsets of our dataset.
Graphic summary of the interactions between traits in the best supported model. Brain shape influences neurocranium shape directly, which itself directly influences beak shape, jaw muscle shape, and eye size.
Graphic summary of evolutionary models that we tested.
Results of two-block partial least squares (pairwise correlation analysis) of all traits from our paper. All traits are significantly correlated with each other.
Mesh of the skull of a pied crow, Corvus albus, showing the landmarks we used to capture skull shape in our dataset.
Taylor West, our scanning technician for this project.
Phylogenetic tree of our study sample, showing silhouettes of the major families. Branches are coloured by clade.
Diagram illustrating some of the differences in brain morphology and jaw muscles size between modern birds and their theropod dinosaur relatives. Images taken from Ksepka et al., 2020 (https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.03.060), Gignac and Erickson, 2017 (https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-02161-w) and Jones et al., 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1186/s40851-019-0129-z)
Diagram illustrating changes in brain shape during the evolution of birds, adapted from: Daniel J. Field, M. Grace Burton, Juan Benito, Olivia Plateau, Guillermo Navalón; Whence the birds: 200 years of dinosaurs, avian antecedents. Biol Lett 1 January 2025; 21 (1): 20240500. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2024.0500
Figure showing comparable chondrocranial stages of six birds, taken from Hüppi, E., Werneburg, I. & Sánchez-Villagra, M.R. Evolution and development of the bird chondrocranium. Front Zool 18, 21 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12983-021-00406-z
A school of bluefin tuna (Thunnus sp.) in the open ocean. Photo Credit: NOAA.
Monk: a beautiful idiot
A little egret stands on a saltmarsh with its head feathers erect
The rear of Down House, former home of Charles Darwin, on a sunny day
A graffito of a kingfisher on the wall of an Indian restaurant
A tabby and white cat elegantly steals a pastry from a paper bag.
A section of paranoid diatribe where the author laments that you might be stopped and searched or banned from a shop for refusing to pay.
An encounter with a small cat on a street in London
A Laura Loomer (no idea either) tweet, killing satire dead