File:Oceanodroma macrodactyla (Guadalupe petrel) 2.jpg

English: Oceanodroma macrodactyla Bryant, 1887 - male Guadalupe petrel (mount, FMNH 33449, Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, Illinois, USA).

The procellariiform birds are the albatrosses and petrels, seabirds that are frequently over the open-ocean. The Guadalupe petrel is a recently-extinct bird wiped out by human-introduced cats onto Guadalupe Island, a couple hundred miles offshore from the western margin of Baja California, Mexico. The island was the species’ only nesting locality. Petrels are principally oceanic piscivores (fish eaters), but also feed on small nekto-planktonic marine arthropods.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Procellariiformes, Hydrobatidae

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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.