10,000 Birds
JUNE 17, 2014
The original story is that emus and ostriches and moas and such evolved as a separate group of birds from all the other birds, from the basal birdish thing that gave rise to all the living birds, and became a large land bird. This was on Gondwana.
10,000 Birds
APRIL 20, 2014
But you won’t find Ostrich or another ratite in first place on Jetz et al.’s The Oilbird today lives only in South America, but fossils of similar species are known from Wyoming. It’s a bat-like cave-dwelling, echolocating, fruit-eating nocturnal species capable of hovering on three-foot wings.
10,000 Birds
SEPTEMBER 7, 2014
Not, as Linneaus thought, an ostrich, nor even, as later scientists concluded, a distant cousin of pigeons deserving of family rank, it was an honest-to-goodness pigeon, deeply embedded within the family Columbidae. The Dodo ( Raphus cucullatus ) — that towering icon of modern anthropogenic extinctions — was a pigeon.
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