A prominent Polish scientist on a working visit to the National Museum of Natural History — BAS

As part of the inter-academic cooperation of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences with the Polish Academy of Sciences, Prof. Dr Zbigniew M. Bochenski — one of the world’s leading specialists in the field of palaeornithology — worked at the National Museum of Natural Sciences at the BAS from September 1 to 8. He is part of the team of the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow and its former director for two terms. He is one of the discoverers of the first hummingbirds (family Trochilidae) in Europe, as well as a dozen of bird species new to science from Paleogene and Neogene localities in Europe and North America. He also developed a new direction in science — the palaeotaphonomy of birds.

His visit is within the framework of a joint bilateral research project under the agreement between BAS and PAN for international scientific collaboration No. IC-PL/15/2024-2025: “Manual for identification of the wing phalanx (phalanx proximalis digiti majoris) of European birds”. It is a two-year project (2024—2025) and from the Bulgarian side, the team includes Prof. DSc Zlatozar Boev — the founder of the palaeornithological direction in the study of birds in Bulgaria through the osteological collection of birds he created — the richest on the Balkan Peninsula and one of the richest in South-Eastern Europe. In the BAS and in the PAN, this project is probably among the most “boutique” scientific projects, because it refers to a very specific problem — the identification by osteomorphological and metrical characters of a bone from the wings of birds in Europe. It is the largest phalanx of the finger on the wings of modern birds — the first phalanx of the big (third) finger. It is a flat and compact bone and is usually relatively well preserved in earth layers. Therefore, it is found relatively often (compared to other phalanges) during excavations in palaeontological and archaeological sites. However, due to its small (compared to the rest of the bones of the skeleton) size, it is rarely used to identify the species composition of the birds in the deposits, and thus the information on the palaeoavifauna remains incomplete. The compilation of an illustrated photo-guide combined with morphological and metrical characters would facilitate researchers in the identification of palaeornithological and archaeoornithological materials from European sites.

Work on the project is almost halfway finished. The main illustration plates have been compiled up to the levels of families and genera, and in many cases — up to species. Now everything has to be checked and imperfections have to be corrected. This is a painstaking job in both collections for next year.

All bird species established on the European continent are included in the identification guide. The rich osteological collections of birds at the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences in Krakow and the National Museum of Natural Sciences at the BAS were mainly used for its compilation. Data from the collections of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Kyiv at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, as well as some other collections, were added to them. The study appears as a kind of continuation of another previous similar project, from which two similar identification guides of the distal (claw) phalanges of the toes of diurnal (Accipitriformes and Falconiformes) and nocturnal (Strigiformes) birds of prey in Europe were compiled:

Bochenski, Z. M., Tomek, T., & Wertz, K. (2023). Whose talon is this? A manual for the identification of ungual phalanges of European accipitrid birds of prey. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 33(6), 989—1005.

Wertz, K., Tomek, T., & Bochenski, Z. M. (2023). Whose talon is this? A manual for the identification of ungual phalanges of European birds of prey: Falcons and owls. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, 33(4), 562—576.

You can read more about it here.