BY LETTER
Bird
 Image from Steve Bowers | |
| A Freebird, a tweaked avian species adapted to live in microgravity habitats | |
Birds are a class of feathered, warm-blooded, egg-laying terragen flying vertebrates (Aves), present in most terrestrial ecosystems. Many species are known for bright markings and musical voices.
Birds are descendants of theropod dinosaurs, and though by the advent of humanity on Old Earth they were the last surviving representatives of that clade they were also the most numerous terrestrial vertebrates on the planet. A disproportionate number of bird species became extinct during the Great Dying, but facsimiles of these have been created since on Old Earth by GAIA and her agents as well as by lazurogenicists elsewhere in the Terrragen Sphere. Bird stock was also used quite extensively in lazurogenics for the creation of dinosaurs and other extinct archosaurian clades.
The first bird species to be provolved was the African Gray Parrot during the early Interplanetary Age (the first non-mammalian provolve). Since then many thousands more species have been provolved, tweaked, spliced, bred, or allowed to evolve naturally from isolated populations in small biospheres. Although most bird provolves live in the Utopia Sphere, a large number of species and clades can be found throughout the civilized galaxy.
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Development Notes
Text by M. Alan Kazlev
additions by Stephen Inniss
Initially published on 08 October 2001.
additions by Stephen Inniss
Initially published on 08 October 2001.
