This is Bird Note.

Walk into the visitor's center at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and you'll be greeted by the wall of birds.

So you are craning your neck upwards, and you'll see a world map.

And on this world map, you're going to see painted in life size all the modern families

of birds that were described in 2015. And then when you walk up a stairwell, you're going to be

greeted with a parade of extinct animals that belong to the evolutionary history of birds.

That's artist and scientific illustrator Jane Kim, who partnered with the Cornell Lab to create this epic mural celebrating the evolution and diversity of birds.

In total, Jane illustrated 270 life-sized portraits of living birds, their ancestors, and a cayman to

acknowledge their crocodilian kin.

The living birds are all rendered in full color, while the extinct species are sketched in

black and gray. They range in size from the 30-foot-long,

feathered dinosaur U. Tyrannis Howley

to the tiny, marvelous spatula-tail hummingbird.

With so many portraits,

the mural is about the size of a tennis court

and best viewed from the visitor center's second-story balcony.

Jane says it was tricky to make fine details stand out from that distance,

especially for little brown birds, like the chiming wedge bill from Australia.

It's really sandy and it sort of blends into the backdrop.

But if you look closely at all the birds, there are kind of these colors that you wouldn't normally expect.

There's like lots of hits of ultramarine blues and oranges and pinks.

The lab's scientific advisors worked with Jane to accurately capture each animal's features and behaviors.

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