This is the first re-appraisal in 50 years of concepts of development made in birds. This book is a case study in evolutionary diversification of life histories. Although birds have a rather uniform body plan and physiology, they exhibit marked variation in development type, parental care, and rate of growth. Altricial birds are fully dependent on their parents for warmth and nutrition and begin posthatching life in a more or less embryonic condition. At the other extreme, such superprecocial species as the megapodes are independent of all parental care from hatching, and the neonate, able to...

This volume documents a comparative anatomical approach towards the functional morphology of the middle ear of pathaegnathous and basal neognathous birds. To aid the study, exact images of "non-structures" like the air-filled spaces of the avian skull are in the form of brush images.