Pennaceous feather Pennaceous feather The pennaceous feather is a type of feather present in most modern birds and in some other species of maniraptoriform dinosaurs. A pennaceous feather has a stalk or quill. Its basal part, called a "calamus", is embedded in the skin. The calamus is hollow and has pith formed from the dry remains of the feather pulp, and the calamus opens below by an "inferior umbilicus" and above by a "superior umbilicus". The stalk above the calamus is a solid "rachis" having an umbilical groove on its underside. Pennaceous feathers have a rachis with "vanes" or "vaxillum " spreading
Calamus (poems) the allegedly mind-altering effects of the root. The root was chiefly chewed at the time as a breath-freshener and to relieve stomach complaints. Calamus (poems) The "Calamus" poems are a cluster of poems in "Leaves of Grass" by Walt Whitman. These poems celebrate and promote "the manly love of comrades". Most critics believe that these poems are Whitman's clearest expressions in print of his ideas about homosexual love. The first evidence of the poems that were to become the "Calamus" cluster is an unpublished manuscript sequence of twelve poems entitled "Live Oak With Moss," written in or before spring 1859.