I suppose some introductions are in order?

Male Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) photographed at the Cincinnati Zoo by Greg Hume. Retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

Normally hitting a champagne bottle against the hull is customary for a christening - but since this is a blog and not a boat, this crummy post will just need to do the job! My name is Val. I'm a college student from the American Midwest, where I previously studied evolution and ecology (for about two semesters...) and am now studying sociology. Despite the change in major, zoology and palaeontology have been, and remain, a favorite hobby and area of personal study for me. For the past two years I've been running a blog under this same name on Tumblr. This has been a rewarding experience for me, but sometimes going a bit more in-depth is necessary, something for which Tumblr's particular format is not especially well-equipped.

Accordingly, I've decided to launch this Blogspot site as a companion to the Archosaurophilia Tumblr blog, As this blog goes forward, I hope to catalog my continued attempts to learn more about that most wondrous group of amniotes, the archosaurs, and to share what I learn through a series of posts cataloging archosaurian evolution, behavior, history, and conservation.

But what are archosaurs, any way?

Archosauria is a clade (that is, a natural, evolutionary group of organisms) made up of crocodilians, modern birds, their last common ancestor, and all descendants of that ancestor. This branching category, centered on that single, ancestral node, encompasses a number of widely successful animal groups - including extinct dinosaurs, pterosaurs, and relatives of crocodilians - which flourished during the Mesozoic Era (approx. 252 to 66 Ma) and have continued to do so through our own Cenozoic (66 Ma to present). By most traditional reckonings, Archosauria’s definition would qualify it as a subset of Reptilia, but the inclusion of birds makes traditional, Linnaean taxonomy a bit problematic. The hierarchical rankings Linnaeus created in the 18th Century have been forced to adapt, as evolutionary science and palaeontology have painted a complex picture of the history of life and uncovered a theretofore unimagined diversity of animals which don’t fit into neatly-arranged Classes and Orders in an orderly and convenient way.

I hope to do this diversity justice over the coming months, and I hope that whoever chooses to stop by and read the articles enjoys it as well. Bonsoir!