"Old Saramae Three Kingdoms Chronicle" almost brought back the bird of terror
Welcome to the public number [Sasu] (sasutime)
Related reading: This turtle handicraft bought by Street Travel in Latin America was almost characterized as smuggling by "Baidu Entry"
▲ Panama, a beautiful tropical country, however, tropical and love beauty, the first thing to do is probably sun protection, so Panama's wide-brimmed visor is particularly popular
When it comes to Panama, apart from the brainwashing divine comedy that can be used as an accompaniment to broadcast gymnastics, perhaps the most impressive is the Panamanian straw hat. Once in the local area, it quickly proved that this was not a legend. On the streets of Panama City, there are shops selling straw hats, and there are many fancy and inexpensive prices, and many of the companions buy one.
▲ However, I did not buy it, the main reason is that the journey is long, it is not easy to carry. At the same time, this thing has long been copied successfully in our country, and I still like to get something more chic to wear on my head
Needless to say, on the small streets of Panama's old city, I really saw a strange "hat".
It is not very appropriate to say that it is a hat, in fact, it is often used as a mask in real life.
It's a work of art woven from local pole grass with bright colors, colorful and exaggerated, but not as scrupulous as a refrigerator sticker, and these hats and masks are big enough to put your head in.
For a moment, I had a ridiculous idea--isn't this thing used to release people's heads?
This is not pure dazedness, you know that this side of the Atlantic Ocean of Panama can be called the Caribbean Sea - literally translated as "the ocean of man-eating tribes".
Of course, this is a joke, the Caribbean sea is calm and calm, Panama has long been a civilized country, not even crossing the road without taking the crosswalk, these strange masks, just tourist crafts. For old Sa, who loves new things, this is much more interesting than a Panamanian straw hat.
Probably because these masks are all handicrafts, each one has a different style, shape and creativity, but most of them are lifelike and imaginative.
▲ A local girl tries on an owl mask
▲ This is a cow
▲ This is a parrot
▲ There is even a crocodile shape
▲ However, when I saw this strange-looking big bird, the feeling was only the word "ignorant" could be described- I was not afraid to be ashamed to say that I began to think it was a donkey
What bird can have such a big head? Moreover, there is an almost exaggerated mouth, and only hornbills are remembered as this shape, but they are mainly distributed in Asia and Africa, and they did not cross the sea to the Americas.
Ask the clerk, she can not say a meridian unitary, the local popular Spanish, English level can only be regarded as the level of "half-lingual". After listening for half a day, they said that it was definitely not a donkey, but a large bird that their ancestors had seen, larger than a donkey, and compared to an ostrich galloping action.
Panama has ostriches?! That's unlikely.
I kept this question in Panama's Museum of Nature, and when I met Besha, the waiter who gave us a guide, I asked her if there was such a big bird in Panama.
▲ Big bird? Of course we have it here!
▲ Bisha's first reaction, guessing that it was Panama's national bird horn eagle
It is a mysterious and magical bird of prey, one meter tall, with thick legs and a sharp beak like a machete, living in the rainforest, good at catching all kinds of apes (of course, sometimes catching long-tailed raccoons and the like is not polite), so there is also a nickname called "monkey eating eagle". Panama has species such as capuchin monkeys and squirrel monkeys, but they disappear as far north as Costa Rica and Mexico. Monkeys in South America have been unable to reach North America through the Isthmus of Panama, resulting in the absence of native primates in North America today, mostly related to the ferocious style of this monster to dominate this place and eat one by one.
Under the obscenity of the horned eagle, the tree animals in Mesoamerica are basically left with these sloths that move fastest 2 meters a minute. Sloths grow plants, covered with fluffy moss, and move very slowly. The horned eagle's eyes are special and can easily spot any fast-moving object within ten miles, but they can't do anything about the near-static sloth, cloaked in moss camouflage.
The reason why sloths are mentioned is because Bessa is proud to introduce to us that there are only two kinds of sloths in Panama, one three-toed and one two-toed. But in 2004, the country identified the existence of a third species of sloth, a unique animal in the pearly country known as the "pygmy three-toed sloth." They inhabit only the island of Escudo de Bellaguas in Panama's Bocas del Toro province, and are extremely rare (79 have been found so far, presumably no more than 500 heads). They have become small because they live on the island, weigh only one-third of their continental counterparts, and live only in the mangroves of the island.
▲ Can't help but nag a few sloths, because I want to tell the children with dreams, you see, in 2004, new varieties of sloths can be found on the earth, and there must be many unknown monsters on this planet waiting for you to discover
Life on the tree can avoid the attacks of most beasts of prey, but guys like horned eagles are definitely the nightmares of ancient primates, including our ancestors' ancient apes. However, this fierce guy is actually a bit cute in his shape.
▲ Look at this cute look
▲ Compared with the side face killing of Zhao Pu's fans, is it a bit of a face bump?
Listening to Bisha talk about horn carving is a funny thing, but I don't quite agree with her, so I took out the photo to show her, and she was a little vague, because in Panamanian folk art, the shape of the horn carving when making masks is not like this, but the look below.
▲ How do you feel that teacher Zhao and Teacher Zhao are a bit in the face?
Therefore, the mask I saw was not very popular in the local area, and Bisha could not give an authoritative interpretation.
Seeing that the experts are also a little confused, we temporarily put aside this problem and walk around the museum. It should be said that this small museum is still very interesting.
▲ Su Qian, a female writer who accompanies her, found her own mount here - a large sculpted tooth beast that lived here eight thousand years ago, you see, no matter the size, appearance, hairstyle, color or leg length, the sharp contrast between the two sides has brought a special harmony
As I was walking, Bisha came running to a display case and asked me, "The mask you saw, do you think it's this?"
▲ Seeing this vicious stone bone, Lao Sa couldn't help but pat his head on the door - how did I forget it?
▲ The phorusrhacos, also known as the dinosaur, is another fierce bird of prey that once lived in Panama, and lao Sa had also specifically pondered it when exploring the prototype of the god eagle in "The Condor Heroes"
Unlike the horned eagle, the Horror Bird is a ferocious walking bird that evolved directly from small theropod dinosaurs (similar to the Velociraptor in Jurassic Park) and parted ways with the birds very early, and its ancestors never flew, relying on a fierce sharp beak and sharp hook claws to catch prey — after the Cretaceous Period, the entire mammalian world that had not yet evolved into large beasts of prey trembled under its obscenity.
Terror birds have been widely distributed in North and South America, Panama is located in Central America is an important place for their north-south exchanges, it is estimated that there have been many times in the year of "do not disturb". A wide variety of horror birds have a common feature, that is, more than two-thirds of the length of the skull, as to how to maintain the balance of this large bird when hunting with such a large beak, scientists have not yet unified the view, but some scholars believe that it may have long feathers like Indian headdresses behind the head to solve this problem.
In this way, the image of the terrifying bird is quite similar to the mask I saw.
▲ The question is, the horror bird is an extinct animal, how can it appear in the creative scope of Panamanian artists?
After tens of millions of years on Earth, scientists have judged that as more sophisticated mammals such as saber-toothed tigers, lions, hyenas, etc. entered the Americas through the frozen Bering Strait, the horror bird lost the competition for survival, and this species withdrew from the stage of history about 1.5 million years ago and disappeared.
But...... The world is afraid of the word "but."
A paper on the terror bird was published in the June 1997 issue of Discovery magazine, presenting fossil evidence of the "Titan Bird" found in North America, which may indicate that it did not become extinct until 15,000 years ago. According to paleontologist Baskin.j. A, this "Titan bird" crossed the Isthmus of Panama into North America in the context of the decline of the South American terror bird, and survived there for a considerable time.
This evidence has not been fully confirmed so far, because all the other fossil evidence of the Titan bird is 1.8 million years old, and if it really lived to be 15,000 years ago, where did it go in the middle? Some people suspect that the newly discovered fossils may have been formed in special circumstances, so they give us the wrong age.
▲ However, in any case, this charming strange bird really has the possibility of appearing more than 10,000 years ago
After learning from Bisha, these beast heads and bird head masks all came from an indigenous tribe in Panama, the Embera-Valen tribe. This nation is known for not wearing a top and using only breast ornaments, but is known for being good at weaving.
▲ Nowadays, the handicrafts they compile, including headdresses and masks, are an important supplement to their source of livelihood
They lived in the Chukunak and Sanjan rivers of Darien province on the South American side of Panama, and were relatively primitive until the 20th century, and their lives were portrayed in many Hollywood movies.
The image of the horror bird does have similarities with the ostrich, so could it be that the ancestors of the Embera-Warren tribe really saw the last horror bird in the jungle, so that it was integrated into the creation of folk crafts and passed on from generation to generation? If this is the case, could a bird of terror that once lived more than 10,000 years ago have some lucky offspring (perhaps a specialized pocket version) that is still hidden in the depths of an island or jungle today?
Although this possibility is really unlikely, considering the discovery of the pygmy three-toed sloth, Lao Sa is still full of expectations for such a possibility.
【End】