54 thoughts on “Eggs, all the way down”

  2. Matthew, funny that you should post on eggs today.

    I am in the middle of reading your Generation (excellent, thanks!). And I’m reading all about eggs right now.

    🙂

  3. Let’s go with the obvious – elephant bird egg is big. Hummingbird egg is small. If their is a photography trick, that is cheating.

  5. I loved reading about the elephant bird on Wikipedia.

    “While they were in close geographical proximity to the ostrich, elephant birds’ closest living relatives are kiwis”

    The fact that a enormous bird could be more closely related to a tiny bird than to another huge bird is just one of the many things I love about evolution. It constantly challenges our assumptions!

    1. The really amazing thing is that an enormous bird should be so closely related to a fruit.

    2. I wouldn’t describe kiwis as ‘tiny’. The largest species is the great spotted kiwi or Roroa (Apteryx haastii), which stands about 45 cm (18 in) high and weighs about 3.3 kg (7.3 lb). The males are a little smaller.

      On the topic of egg size, kiwis lay the largest egg in proportion to its size of any bird in the world, weighing up to one-quarter the weight of the female. Brown kiwis (there are a number of sub-species) lay a single egg which may weigh as much as 450 g (16 oz), impressive for a bird of about 40 cm (16 in) high and weigh about 2.8 kg (6.2 lb).

      1. Fair enough. I meant tiny relative to the size of the ostrich and the elephant bird, but I suppose by that logic most birds would be considered tiny!

        The egg size to body is truly amazing! I recall seeing a mock up of a kiwi skeleton with an egg inside of it in a museum. It was crazy. There seemed as if there was barely room for organs in there!

        1. I recall reading somewhere about why the kiwi egg is so large in proportion to its body. Analysis of the kiwi fossil record suggests that modern kiwis were once large birds which evolved to a smaller size, but that the size of the eggs did not reduce concomitantly.

          4. I think Gould covered that in an essay back in the 80s, and it seemed very reasonable at that time and much later also. Recent discovery of a Miocene fossil kiwi (Proapteryx) suggests that this is not the case, however. Proapteryx is represented by a small femur and a normal kiwi-sized quadrate (bone forming the articulation between skull and mandible), which indicates it was possibly still capable of flight (presuming the wings were bigger to make up for the relatively small legs).
            (Even more recently, an ancient-DNA study including an Elephant Bird showed that it’s the closest relative of the Kiwi, so the comfortably parsimonious and sensible theory of flightless ancestral ratites dispersing/vicariating during the breakup of Gondwana no longer has any validity. More likely the ostrich, rhea, kiwi, elephant bird, and emu/cassowary diverged as flying birds and converged on the ratite morphotype near where they live now…)

  8. I’ve read Horton Hatches the Egg, so I know that an elephant bird is born when an elephant incubates a bird’s egg for a sufficient time that its genetic material causes that hatched animal to grow a trunk. I assume that’s what this is referring to?

  9. I remember a little while ago when an elephant bird egg was auctioned off at Christie’s. I also remember that the egg was enormous so I’m gonna guess that this isn’t a trick question and the huge one on the left is the elephant bird egg while the smaller one on the right is the ovum of the diminutive hummingbird.

          3. The shocking thing wasn’t that Uhuru was coloured, it was that she wasn’t green-coloured.
            Captain Kirk – popular entertainment’s original and most admired zoophile. “In the ear/ Of a deer, boys! … Up the hole of a mole … tie me kangaroo down, boys, tie me kangaroo down!” and songs and lines (literally) ad nauseam.

  17. I saw a cartoon once showing a chicken and an egg lying in bed smoking cigarettes- the chicken said, “I guess we answered THAT question, didn’t we.?”

  18. The big one is the hummingbird’s. The little one is the elephant bird’s. That’s what it says in my magical iron-age compendium of all knowledge, so it must be right, and all the scientists, who rely on facts and reasoning, are wrong.

    An even better test would have been to put a bat’s egg in there with the other two.

    1. Part of me is scared to meet a hummingbird that could carry such an egg, but part of me is delighted.

      Their wings would be as loud as helicopters & maybe they’d chase us!

  19. I misread it as “an elephant egg and a hummingbird egg”. I thought, “Ha, very clever… but the elephant egg is inside the ovary with lots of other eggs, so the hummingbird egg could be bigger”. I also don’t hear well, so I have these kinds of things happen a lot 🙂

      1. I read it okay but then all of a sudden thought “wait a minute” & looked more carefully because I thought it might be a trick.

  20. I manage a movie theater and we sell two sizes of popcorn: a 32 oz cup and an 85 oz bag. They are next to each other on the display and people will stare at them and ask, “Which one’s bigger?” This happens ALL the time. I wonder how these people would do with this quiz?

    1. Two pounds of popcorn versus five-odd pounds?
      You get many coach parties passing through?

      1. And some people wonder why America has an obesity epidemic. Actually, it’s a unit of volume, not weight; “32 ounces” means that the container would hold 32 ounces of wine.

        1. Ah … and do I detect the false statement that “a pint is a pound / the world around” looming in the near future?

  21. Tut, tut, Matthew, no scale? Back to the museum and re-take the photograph. (Actually, I keep a photographic scale in my Filofax, and a separate one in the camera bag. No point not having them to hand. I really should write the diameter on my various lens caps too. … I knew I had a good reason for grabbing a welder’s white marker when I found it on the floor of the locker room ; I just couldn’t remember the reason!
    What struck me was, would a parallel photograph be possible between the hummingbird egg and a convenient mammal’s egg? A deer as per your Egg and Sperm Race book and board game, being more accessible than an elephant egg, but a (discarded) human egg might be more accessible.

    1. Most lens caps have the filter size they fit stamped into the mold on the inside. Also, with digital cameras, the lens model will be recorded in the file; if you’re careful to use the lens cap that came off the same lens, that’ll tell you, too….

      b&

Comments are closed.