Flightless birds’ history upset by ancient DNA
Ancestors of kiwis and elephant birds didn’t just drift with the continents
By Susan Milius
Madagascar’s elephant birds — which weighed as much as three or four people and went extinct several hundred years ago — turn out to be the closest known relatives of New Zealand’s chicken-sized kiwi.
This genealogical surprise is “a slap in the face” to a long-standing idea of how many flightless birds evolved, says evolutionary biologist Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide in Australia. Realizing that continents moved around, biologists in the 1970s debated whether ostriches, kiwis and the rest of the flightless wonders called ratites arose when flightless common ancestors drifted apart by riding along on land masses that fragmented and separated.