Stole My Idea

On boing boing, there is a link to a great site of sea-bird skulls. I myself have been accumulating photos of skulls of various birds, including sea-birds from the collections of the University of Alberta, and plan to evenually create an on-line searchable database of the photos that I have taken. This way, people will be able to do morphometric and comparative studies of specimens that are thousands of miles away or that their own collections don't have. I have two problems with the sea-bird skull gallery. First of all, you can't enlarge the photos, meaning no hope of doing any detailed anatomical work (though generally you need the real specimen for that anyway). Second, none of the photos appear to have a scale bar in them. When doing morphometrics, its important to know at least roughly how large the skull is. After all, if a goose had a head proportionately as large as that of a humming bird, they would fall over forward (the heads of most humming birds are longer than the rest of their bodies). The humming bird can manage such a large head because his whole body is so small, that his tiny little neck muscles have to do proportionately less work to keep up the head (it all works out logerithmically).