File:Campephilus principalis (ivory-billed woodpecker) 3.jpg

English: Campephilus principalis (Linnaeus, 1758) - male ivory-billed woodpecker (mount, CMC B32708, Cincinnati Museum of Natural History & Science, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA).

Recorded calls & sightings of the ivory-billed woodpecker in southern America in recent years have been received with much excitement by ornithologists & the general public (listen to a genuine 1935 recording made in Louisiana - www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/multimedia/sounds/knownsounds...) (listen to a 2005 recording made in Arkansas - turn up your computer speaker - www.birds.cornell.edu/ivory/multimedia/sounds/arkansasken...). The species, Campephilus principalis, has been considered extinct or near-extinct for much of the 20th century. It originally lived in southeastern America and Cuba (mitochondrial DNA analysis has suggested that the extinct or near-extinct Cuban form is a distinct species, Campephilus bairdii; the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker, and the imperial woodpecker (Campephilus imperialis) diverged from each during the late Early Pleistocene, at about 1 m.y. ago; see Fleischer et al., 2006, Biology Letters 2: 466-469).

The ivory-bill is a very large, black-and-white woodpecker that resembles another large bird, the still-living pileated woodpecker (Dryocopus pileatus - www.flickr.com/photos/jsjgeology/31840088527). The adult male ivory-bill has a wedge of intense red coloration at the back of the head. Juvenile and the female ivory-bills lack the reddish-colored wedge.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Piciformes, Picidae

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Birds are small to large, warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered, bipedal vertebrates capable of powered flight (although some are secondarily flightless). Many scientists characterize birds as dinosaurs, but this is consequence of the physical structure of evolutionary diagrams. Birds aren’t dinosaurs. They’re birds. The logic & rationale that some use to justify statements such as “birds are dinosaurs” is the same logic & rationale that results in saying “vertebrates are echinoderms”. Well, no one says the latter. No one should say the former, either.

However, birds are evolutionarily derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds first appeared in the Triassic or Jurassic, depending on which avian paleontologist you ask. They inhabit a wide variety of terrestrial and surface marine environments, and exhibit considerable variation in behaviors and diets.