File:Phoenicopterus ruber (greater flamingo) 2.jpg

English: Phoenicopterus ruber Linnaeus, 1758 - the greater flamingo (mount, Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA).

Flamingos (Family Phoenicopteridae) are arguably the oddest looking birds on Earth. The five modern species are characterized by the presence of hyper-elongated legs and necks, and a strongly ventrally-directed beak. Unique among modern birds, flamingos are filter feeders. They feed with their head upside-down and their dorsal beak downward, straining water or fine-grained sediment for particles of food (ranging from photosynthetic bacteria to protists to metaphytes to small metazoans).

Flamingos range in plumage coloration from very pale pink to pinkish red. This coloration is attributed to pigments derived from small crustaceans in flamingo diets. Captive flamingos can be given carrot juice to induce pink coloration in their feathers.

Flamingos prefer extreme environments. They are known to occupy and nest in hypersaline marine settings and alkaline lacustrine settings. These harsh environments are likely used to keep potential predators at bay.

Classification: Animalia, Chordata, Vertebrata, Aves, Phoenicopteriformes, Phoenicopteridae

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Birds are small to large, warm-blooded, egg-laying, feathered, bipedal vertebrates capable of powered flight (although some are secondarily flightless). Many scientists characterize birds as dinosaurs, but this is consequence of the physical structure of evolutionary diagrams. Birds aren’t dinosaurs. They’re birds. The logic & rationale that some use to justify statements such as “birds are dinosaurs” is the same logic & rationale that results in saying “vertebrates are echinoderms”. Well, no one says the latter. No one should say the former, either.

However, birds are evolutionarily derived from theropod dinosaurs. Birds first appeared in the Triassic or Jurassic, depending on which avian paleontologist you ask. They inhabit a wide variety of terrestrial and surface marine environments, and exhibit considerable variation in behaviors and diets.