The rapid extinction of giant animals including wombat-like creatures as big as cars, birds more than two meters tall, and lizards more than seven meters long that once roamed the Australian continent is a puzzle that has ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 13, 2021
2
296
There would be at least four times as many flightless bird species on Earth today if it were not for human influences, finds a study led by UCL researchers.The study, published in Science Advances, finds that flightlessness ...
Evolution
Dec 2, 2020
2
389
Cassowaries are big flightless birds with blue heads and dinosaur-looking feet; they look like emus that time forgot, and they're objectively terrifying. They're also, along with their ostrich and kiwi cousins, part of the ...
Plants & Animals
May 13, 2020
3
1017
A team of evolutionary biologists, led by Dr. Rui Diogo at Howard University, and writing in the journal Development, have demonstrated that numerous atavistic limb muscles—known to be present in many limbed animals but ...
Evolution
Oct 1, 2019
6
572
Weka are often portrayed as little more than sandwich-stealing scallywags. The large, brown flightless bird's tendency to be curious and gobble any food available (whether it be an unwatched biscuit, penguin egg or endangered ...
Plants & Animals
Sep 11, 2019
0
14
Weka are often portrayed as little more than sandwich-stealing scallywags. The large, brown flightless bird's tendency to be curious and gobble any food available (whether it be an unwatched biscuit, penguin egg or endangered ...
Plants & Animals
Aug 28, 2019
0
4
Since Darwin's era, scientists have wondered how flightless birds like emus, ostriches, kiwis, cassowaries, and others are related, and for decades the assumption was that they must all share a common ancestor who abandoned ...
Evolution
May 7, 2019
0
4
On many continents during the last ice age, typically from about 50,000 to 12,000 years ago, species of megafauna that had lived there for hundreds of thousands of years became extinct. Comparatively abruptly, it appears, ...
Ecology
Apr 15, 2019
0
12
Scientists have revealed the African origins of New Zealand's most mysterious giant flightless bird – the now extinct adzebill – showing that some of its closest living relatives are the pint-sized flufftails from Madagascar ...
Plants & Animals
Feb 21, 2019
0
63
Evolution is a fascinating field but can be rife with misunderstanding. One misconception is that evolution has some innate sense of direction or purpose. In reality, evolution is a mindless, plan-free phenomenon, driven ...
Plants & Animals
Dec 11, 2018
3
52
