Posted by Alejandra Valenzuela Cofiño on January 31, 2024

Feathered, warm-blooded and fast-hearted; with a strong yet light-weight skeleton and a four-chambered heart. Birds are egg-laying animals that have been around since before Pangea’s continental breakup, and are direct descendants from a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called Theropods. These were small feathery raptor-like dinosaurs, from the same group to which the infamous T-Rex belonged to! Their smaller size, ability to fly, plus their wide range of food sources (and maybe a little bit of luck) made them the only dinosaurs to survive Earth’s fifth mass extinction. With fossils of their ancestors dating up to 150 million years ago, Modern Birds (Neornithes) are now a group of almost ten thousand known species!

Nowadays, at least a few of these species can be found nearly on every spot on Earth. They have been seen flying all over the world, including over places as bleak as the South Pole or the top of the Himalayas. A wide array of adaptations have resulted in high-speed flying birds of prey as well as non-flying 300 pound ostriches; black and white penguins as well as vibrant scarlet-red macaws with colorful tail feathers. In between all this diversity, the main characteristics that describe all modern birds are: their feathers, wings, toothless beaks, bipedal locomotion and the laying of hard-shelled eggs where embryos conclude their development.

In FLAAR, we love to photograph the tropical bird diversity that we are lucky enough to find during our adventures. These captivating Wood Storks (Mycteria Americana) are a perfect example of the beauties we can find in Mesoamerica’s wetlands! These birds may not appear big through the lens, but in fact they can grow to be over 50 inches tall. They are called “wading birds” because they are almost always found wading along shorelines in search of aquatic insects or crustaceans. As you may see in the pictures, they have long and thin legs that help them wade across the wetlands, and an unfeathered head with a high-vascularised skin that helps them with heat dissipation. The beautiful Mycteria americana species is adapted to the hot and moist weather of these tropical wetlands, just like our passionate FLAAR adventurers.

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Two Mycteria americana on a grass field.
Photography by: María Alejandra Gutierrez, FLAAR Mesoamérica, 2024. La Blanca, Petén, Guatemala.

Posted January 18, 2024

This PowerPoint presentation will show scenes not available elsewhere. If you are a student you will find topics for your BA thesis, MA thesis or your PhD dissertation.

If you are a professor this PPTx provides you digital rollouts by Nicholas Hellmuth that have never previously been published. You have permission to download any and all images from this lecture and add to your own presentations.

For the general public this full-color lecture will introduce you to aspects of Classic Maya art (including derived from Olmec art) and continuing into the Post Classic Dresden Codex.

So on the evening of January 22, join us for several thousand years of art, iconography, architecture plus epigraphy of hieroglyphs.

The attached document shows sample illustrations from the lecture.

Click to open the PDF

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Posted August 18, 2023

On August 14 we celebrate World Lizard Day. These are a fairly large group of vertebrates with thousands of species and with quite peculiar characteristics. Do you want to know what they are and why are they so interesting? Keep reading to learn more about them.

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Anolis sp. Reserve Tapon Creek, Livingston, Izabal. David Arrivillaga, 2021.

Lizards are a big and widespread group of reptiles that belong to the order Squamata. There are around 12,000 species and live across the world except in Antarctica. Lizards are scaly-skinned reptiles that are distinguished from snakes because they possess legs, movable eyelids, and external ear openings. However, some species of lizard’s lack one or more of these features. Lizards are by far the most diverse group of modern reptiles in body, shape, and size. Representatives of some families are limbless and resemble snakes, whereas may be outfitted with a wide array of ornamentation such as extensible throat fans and frills, throat spines, horns or casques on the head, and tail crest.

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Coleonyx elegans, gecko. Posada Caribe, Sayaxché, Petén. David Arrivillaga, 2021.

Lizards have a diverse range of habitats, from underground warrens and burrows to the surface and elevated vegetation. Some are slow, move with caution and rely on cryptic coloration for protection, whereas others can run fast across. Small species such as geckos, not only have colonized islands but also invaded cities around the world. Hemidactylus species are common in houses and buildings that most people know more about it. They appeared to do very well living with people in disturbed areas but did not seem to invade undisturbed habitats.

Posted August 1, 2023

The department of El Progreso has unique biological diversity in the region however, that has been little known and admired by the population; since among the different ecosystems present in the department, the most outstanding is the Dry Forest, also known as thorny forest, scrubland, chaparral o xerophytic forest, alluding to its characteristic. Dry forests have generally been associated with low attractiveness, because they are composed of plant communities comprised of trees with small structures, scattered, losing their leaves during the dry season of the year, as well various shrubby plants. However, they have a unique diversity with many endemic flora and fauna species.

Dry forests in Guatemala occupy 4.49% of the country’s total area. These are being affected by the expansion of the agricultural frontier, the formation of pasture, and the extraction of wood for firewood. The research in this area is very limited, despite being one of the places with the greatest endemism in Guatemala. Even though several studies have been carried out in the dry forest, there are few records of fauna, especially for the department of El Progreso.

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Calocitta formosa (White-throated magpie-jay). El Rancho, El Progreso. Edwin Solares, 2023.

Posted July 19, 2023

Fish, crocodiles and waterbirds are the fauna most often associated with freshwater scenes in Classic Maya art. Jaguars love to swim and have water lilies decorating their heads in a Late Classic Codex Style painting. Marine shells were popular sources of jewelry for the Maya and shells are common in the murals of Cacaxtla. Marine scenes are also known from murals of Chichen Itza but our present research is on freshwater ecosystems, primarily in Peten, Guatemala.

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What in the world does this photo show? If you CLICK, you will see what we found as we hiked through this savanna on April 1, 2022 as part of our 5-year project of coordination and cooperation with CONAP to study the flora, fauna, and biodiverse ecosystems of the RBM.

PNLT Savanna #13, far southeast part of Parque Nacional Laguna del Tigre, Reserva de la Biosfera Maya (RBM), Peten. Photo by Edwin Solares, FLAAR Photo Archive.

You can see LOTS of previously undocumented, previously unexplored savanna wetlands of the RBM in this week’s 36 Simposio de Investigaciones Arqueológicas en Guatemala

The presentation on plants, animals and biodiverse ecosystems of Nicholas Hellmuth is this Thursday, July 20, 2023, Los ecosistemas de humedales actuales también estaban al alcance de los mayas del Periodo Clásico, 11:15 to 11:45am.

If you prefer this lecture in English, we have a 1-hour edition, all full color, to show you parts of the “jungle” that you don’t often see. He has lectured over many decades around the world: Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Costa Rica, across USA and Canada, UK and across EU, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, South Africa, Japan, China, Taiwan and other countries. These lectures are also available via ZOOM.

This lecture is based on over 50-years of in-person field trips and exploration of wetland ecosystems of Mesoamerica, especially in Guatemala and Mexico. The photos are mostly from our recent years of our continuing 5-year project of coordination and cooperation with CONAP to study flora, fauna, and biodiverse ecosystems in the 21,600 square kilometers of the Reserva de la Biosfera Maya.

Posted by Nicholas Hellmuth on June 22, 2023

Since vultures are occasionally pictured in Classic Maya art, we like to photograph vultures when we see them along the roads. So here is a quick snapshot.

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Normally we see black vultures eating an animal that has been run over on the highway. But today (June 22, 2023) we saw these vultures at a waterhole near the highway.