Scarlet macaws are native to the tropics. So how'd they end up in New Mexico? Flickr/Nina Hale A remote northwestern corner of what is now New Mexico isn’t the first place you’d expect to find a ...

A century or more before the Spanish set foot in the Americas, birds of a multi-hued feather were bred together in what’s now a desolate part of northwestern Mexico. That, at least, is the implication ...

Researchers report genetic evidence of pre-Hispanic breeding of scarlet macaws, native to Central and South America, in the American Southwest. Scarlet macaws figure prominently in ancient cultures ...

DNA evidence appears to have revealed an ancient parrot-breeding operation in the southwestern United States, a new study reports. A team of researchers from several U.S. universities analyzed ancient ...

American Antiquity, Vol. 58, No. 2 (Apr., 1993), pp. 270-276 (7 pages) The scarlet macaw (Ara macao) was an important prehistoric trade item in northern Mexico and southwestern United States. Paquime ...

Somewhere in the American Southwest or northern Mexico, there are probably the ruins of a scarlet macaw breeding operation dating to between 900 and 1200 C.E., according to a team of archaeologists ...

As the tight beam of the scanning electron microscope focused on a tiny fragment of ancient eggshell, I immediately saw one of the inner shell’s layers had been partially reabsorbed. This exciting ...

For more than two millennia, indigenous peoples in Mesoamerica have traded macaws and included their feathers in rituals. The birds held immense symbolic value and represented sun gods in both Maya ...