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SCIENCE | NYT NOW
A Theory on How Flightless Birds Spread Across
the World: They Flew There
MAY 22, 2014
Carl Zimmer
MATTER
Just a few centuries ago, Madagascar was home to a monstrous creature
called the elephant bird. It towered as high as nine feet. Weighing as much
as 600 pounds, it was the heaviest bird known to science. Youd need 160
chicken eggs to equal the volume of a single elephant bird egg.
The only feature of the elephant bird that wasnt gigantic was its
wings, which were useless, shriveled arms. Instead of flying, the elephant
bird kept its head down much of the time, grazing on plants.
Scientists arent precisely sure when this strange creature became
extinct, but it probably endured well into our human-dominated age.
In the Middle Ages, Marco Polo heard tales of a huge bird that stalked
Madagascar. A French colonial governor of Madagascar wrote in 1658
about a giant bird that lived in the remote parts of the island. Today,
scientists are trying to determine when the elephant bird became extinct
by estimating the age of its youngest remains. Its possible the birds were
still thundering across Madagascar in the 1800s.
Now that the elephant bird is gone, scientists have to content
themselves with indirect clues to its existence. For a long time, they could
only study its bones and fragments of eggshells. In the 1990s, some
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scientists began to look for bits of DNA in those elephant bird remains, but
for two decades they came up dry.
Finally, a team of Australian researchers has now recovered sizable
chunks of DNA from two different species of elephant birds. And that
genetic material has delivered a big surprise: it turns out that the closest
relative of the mighty elephant bird is the kiwi, a six-pound flightless bird
that lives more than 7,000 miles away, in New Zealand.
Other experts accepted the finding, reported on Thursday in the
journal Science, although they didnt see it coming. I dont think anyone
would have predicted kiwis, said Joel L. Cracraft, the curator of
ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History, who was not
involved in the research.
The research isnt just prompting scientists to rethink the evolution of
elephant birds. Its also fueling a broader debate about the origins of many
of the worlds best-known flightless birds, from ostriches in Africa to emus
in Australia.
These birds, called ratites, are distinguished from other birds not just
by their lack of flight, but also by the distinctive arrangement of bones in
their head.
Living ratites also include the cassowaries of Australia and New
Guinea, and the rheas of South America. Another giant ratite, the moa,
lived on New Zealand until about 600 years ago.
For over a century, ratites have posed a kind of biological jigsaw
puzzle. How did a group of flightless birds end up scattered far and wide
across the Southern Hemisphere?
In the 1970s, Dr. Cracraft proposed that the answer was continental
drift. Two hundred million years ago, the southern landmasses were all
part of a single giant continent, known as Gondwana. Over millions of
years, Gondwana broke into pieces that drifted apart. Those pieces carried
away the flightless ratites that lived on them.
For evidence, Dr. Cracraft pointed to the timing of Gondwanas
breakup. Africa was the first continent to peel away, for example. Africas
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ratites ostriches are the first lineage to have split from other ratites.
In the 1990s, scientists began testing Dr. Cracrafts hypothesis
through DNA comparisons of living species. They also started searching
for material from extinct moas and elephant birds.
Alan Cooper of the University of Adelaide retrieved the first moa DNA,
and gradually other researchers found more. In 2008, Oliver Haddrath of
the Royal Ontario Museum and his colleagues compared the moa DNA to
those of other ratites and got a surprise. They found that the closest
relative of the moa was a small flying bird from Central and South
America called the tinamou.
That didnt make much sense if their common ancestor had already
lost its wings.
This discovery made scientists all the more curious about what secrets
were hidden in elephant bird DNA. Dr. Cooper had tried in the early 1990s
to extract elephant bird DNA from fossils, but he had come up empty.
Since then, the technology for retrieving ancient DNA has become far
more powerful. Scientists can now recover much smaller quantities of
genetic material. So Dr. Cooper recently decided to have another go at the
elephant bird bones.
This time he and his colleagues succeeded. It feels great to finally sort
it out, said Dr. Cooper.
When the scientists compared the elephant bird DNA to that of other
birds, they were surprised to find that kiwis were the most closely related
species.
They could also estimate how long ago the two lineages shared a
common ancestor by counting up the mutations that have accumulated in
the kiwi and elephant bird DNA. They estimate that the ancestral bird
lived 50 million years ago.
That date poses a serious problem to the idea that ratites have been
flightless since the days of Gondwana. By 50 million years ago,
Madagascar and New Zealand were already separated by an ocean.
You cant get from Madagascar to New Zealand without flying, said
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Dr. Cooper. There isnt any other way.
These findings have led Dr. Cooper and his colleagues to propose a
new hypothesis for how ratites evolved. Rather than being flightless, their
ancestor was a partridge-like bird that could travel by air. Between 65 and
50 million years ago, early ratites flew across much of the world, finding
new homes where they could settle.
It was a lucky time for them. The large plant-eating dinosaurs had
become extinct, and it would take millions of years before large plant-
eating mammals would take their place. In at least six instances, Dr.
Cooper argues, ratites evolved, losing their wings and becoming plant-
eating birds.
Other experts didnt think theres enough evidence yet to support this
proposition. I dont go along with that, said Dr. Cracraft.
Dr. Haddrath said, Its a very neat idea, but its largely speculation.
Both Dr. Haddrath and Dr. Cracraft agreed that it wont be long
before the full story of ratites could be told. Scientists are now gathering
more DNA from both living and extinct birds, which will likely reveal more
details of their evolutionary tree. This wont be a mystery much longer,
said Dr. Cracraft.
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