Phoenix 3 . female red-tail black cockatoo tail feather, naturally shed from a captive bird
I discovered a treasure list when I searched Wikepedia for “mythic birds”. This was for further research into an idea of feather totems, a series I am designing. The series began with sketches of long feathers carved into totem pole-type of arrangements using silhouettes of different kinds of large birds standing on each other, like eagles and herons and turkeys. Then I thought of arranging birds in their currently understood evolutionary order with ducks on the bottom. From that I thought, why not put the bones of an archaeopteryx on the bottom and go up from there? And from there, I got more fanciful and asked myself, how about a phoenix? Where does that fit into an evolutionary order? What other mythic birds are there? That’s when I looked to Wikepedia.