As regular CFZ-watchers will know, for some time Corinna has been doing a column for Animals & Men and a regular segment on On The Track... particularly about out-of-place birds and rare vagrants. There seem to be more and more bird stories from all over the world hitting the news these days so, to make room for them all - and to give them all equal and worthy coverage - she has set up this new blog to cover all things feathery and Fortean.

Sunday 23 June 2019

Fresh look at mysterious Nasca lines in Peru



Using a taxonomic approach, scientists have re-identified the huge birds drawn on the desert plains of Peru as hermits or pelicans
Date:  June 19, 2019
Source:  Hokkaido University
A scientific approach has been used to re-identify huge birds etched into the desert plains of southern Peru around 2,000 years ago. The birds appear to be exotic to the region and further studies could help explain their significance. The study is published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
The lines and geoglyphs of Nasca and Palpa are located some 400 kilometers south of Lima, Peru and form a World Heritage Site covering an area of about 450 square kilometers. They were carved into the ground between 400 B.C.E and 1000 C.E. by pre-Inca people, and include lines, geometric designs, and animal and plant drawings. Most of these etchings are so large that they are best seen in aerial photographs. Identifying what they represent is an essential first step towards unraveling the mystery of why they were drawn in the first place.
Masaki Eda of The Hokkaido University Museum, Takeshi Yamasaki of Yamashina Institute for Ornithology, and Masato Sakai of Yamagata University in Japan applied an ornithological approach to identify the 16 bird geoglyphs among more than 2,000 drawings present in the area. "Until now, the birds in these drawings have been identified based on general impressions or a few morphological traits present in each figure. We closely noted the shapes and relative sizes of the birds' beaks, heads, necks, bodies, wings, tails and feet and compared them with those of modern birds in Peru,"says Eda.

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