ORNITHOLOGICAL LITERATURE 
191 
mindset and Weltanschauung regarding proce¬ 
dures and results, and the treatment of literature. 
Some insight into the different ways of thinking 
may be gained by Serjentson’s characterization of 
bones brought into a human archeological site by 
wild animals as “intrusives,” whereas in a 
paleontological site all the stuff trucked in by 
humans is “intrusive.” Serjeantson has relied 
almost entirely on the archeological literature for 
her sources. A glaring omission that is not 
mentioned is Pierce Brodkorb’s Catalogue of 
Fossil Birds (5 parts, 1963-1978). Brodkorb went 
to great lengths to attempt to include every 
reference he could find to avian remains in 
archeological deposits; his Catalogue has to be a 
much more inclusive source for the zooarcheol¬ 
ogy of birds than anything cited by Serjeantson. 
Lack of ornithological knowledge has resulted 
in the commission of some “clangers” of unusual 
plangency. From page 4 alone we have the 
following. “Birds evolved from therapod [sic] 
dinosaurs in the Late Cretaceous era (Feduccia 
1999).” Whatever birds evolved from, the 
divergence took place long before the Late 
Cretaceous, which is a geological period , part of 
the Cenozoic Era, and citing Feduccia is seriously 
misleading because he is by far the most 
outspoken opponent of the theropod derivation 
of birds. “Cordata” should be “Chordata.” The 
Linnean classification was established in the 18th, 
not the 19th century; the idea that it remained 
basically the same from then until cladistics and 
DNA analyses brought about “changes in the 
accepted relationships between families” is 
beyond nonsensical, especially considering that 
the taxonomic family is a post-Linnean concept. 
Hildegarde Howard did not begin her career 
studying fossils from Rancho La Brea and then 
move on to the zooarcheology of the Emeryville 
shellmound (page 5). Quite the opposite—the 
Emeryville study was the topic of her Disserta¬ 
tion. The wings of the Galapagos flightless 
cormorant are not used for swimming, whereas 
those of all penguins are, not just the larger ones 
(page 8). Hummingbirds do not feed only on 
nectar (page 14). Bitterns (Botaurinae) do not 
‘walk on the surface of water” (page 32). The 
gizzard is not equivalent to the crop (page 32). We 
learn that a newly fledged gannet is “known 
locally as a guga ” (pages 36-37), but the locality 
(Hebrides) is never specified. 
More importantly, there are numerous errone¬ 
ous statements concerning avian skeletal anatomy. 
There are many exceptions to the categorical 
statement that a “pneumatic foramen of the 
humerus is characteristic of all flying birds” 
(page 20). The elements of the skull are probably 
not all “fully fused at the time of hatching” (page 
21) in any bird. The structure “at the bifurcation 
of the trachea in some waterfowl” (page 21) is not 
the syrinx. Radiale and ulnare are incorrectly 
rendered as “radial” and “ulnar” (page 28). 
What is described as the major digit (page 29) is 
actually the first phalanx of the major digit. This 
is indeed perforated in gulls (and terns) but not in 
“some owls” and instead occurs in caprimulgids. 
The generalization about the presence of a 
triangular patella in birds (page 29), is invalid as 
an ossified patella is rare in birds and, when 
present, its shape is extremely variable. The 
descriptions of the configuration of the tarsometa- 
tarsus in zygodactyl birds are badly confounded 
(page 30). The tarsal cap of the tarsometatarsus is 
wrongly termed the “hypotarsus” (page 39). 
Once the terminology has been straightened out, 
the statement that the “pelvis becomes attached 
to the synsacrum in the mature bird” (page 23) is 
not true for many kinds of birds. Here (and 
pages 110-111) “pelvis” is synonymous with the 
“innominate bone” consisting of the fused ilium, 
ischium, and pubis, whereas synsacrum is used to 
mean only the fused sacral vertebrae (as in 
Appendix Fig. 2b, where the rendering is so crude 
as to be unrecognizable). Elsewhere (e.g., page 
24) “synsacrum” is used to indicate what I would 
call the entire pelvis, that is, both innominates 
plus the fused sacral vertebrae. The wording of 
the assertion that the “vertebral column includes 
two sections which fuse in the adult bird: the 
notarium and the synsacrum” (page 23), probably 
is intended to mean that each of those elements 
consists of fused vertebrae, but almost anyone 
would interpret the statement as meaning that the 
notarium and synsacrum are fused to each other, 
which is never true. 
The two sentences (page 21) devoted to 
directionality in the avian skeleton are of 
absolutely no use to anyone and do not even 
mention the schism over anterior/posterior versus 
cranial/caudal. It is hardly surprising that the 
coracoid “is one of the elements most superfi¬ 
cially distinct from mammal bones” (page 26), 
considering that mammals do not have a coracoid. 
Although the geographical coverage of the book 
is supposedly worldwide, it is in fact heavily 
Eurocentric. There is no treatment whatever of 
