Can you recognise the bird above – it’s already on my list although the examples I have seen were all in fresher plumage because this is a 46,000 year old bird found preserved in Siberian permafrost.
It’s actually a Horned Lark (or a Shore Lark, or maybe something a bit different and earlier than either race/species).
What an amazing find!
I’ve seen Horned Larks on the farmland of New York State, the tall grass prairie of Colorado and many other sites but the most memorable were on the Beartooth Highway between Montana and Wyoming where I found myself unable to cross the border at just below 11,000 feet because although Montana had cleared all the snow on their side Wyoming had not and so I faced an 8-foot wall of snow. As I fumed slightly about not being able to get to Yellowstone for tomorrow morning all I could do was look around and calm down by watching the Horned Larks running around on the snow and ice.
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This is amazing! They’ve also found cave lion cubs in the permafrost in the past few years https://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/tragic-truth-about-two-frozen-55000-year-old-cave-lion-cubs-is-revealed-by-scientists/. It was when they looked at the physical features of frozen mammoths they realised that cave paintings matched with them and thereby the latter were genuine, truly ancient. The mind boggles at what else might be preserved there, maybe a Neanderthal in western Siberia, an Irish elk, a giant beaver (black bear sized) in the Canadian permafrost that had strayed from further south? So many wonders to fill your life with and people wreck some of them by shooting grouse and knocking little white balls into holes, natural splendour versus human inanities.