Prehistoric bird 'too fat and lazy' to fly
Prehistoric moa could actually fly but lost the ability after the extinction of dinosaurs made them "fat and lazy" on land, a new study suggests.
The discovery debunks global theories about the age of flightless birds and suggests the moa's ancestor flew to New Zealand from Antarctica.
Science had long thought ratites - Earth's largest flightless birds, which include moa, ostriches, and emus - descended from a common flightless ancestor.
But DNA analysis by Massey University revealed the moa was closely related to the tinamou - a small flighted bird still found in South America.
When dinosaurs died 65 million years ago, some birds became land-dwellers, which allowed them to put on more weight.
They eventually became too heavy to fly and simply gave up, evolving into moa in New Zealand as well as ostriches, emus and cassowaries in Australia.
Weird Science Factoid: Chained dogs are three times more likely to bite than unchained pooches. Not so sure about this statistic, surely that's why they're chained?
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Authors
Daniel Smith - a long time ago, in a galaxy far away just north of Watford, Daniel fancied himself as a scientist but turned out to be the worst scientist since that bloke who mapped out all those canals on Mars that turned out to be scratches on his telescope's lens. Luckily, he is now not working on the Large Hadron Collider inadvertently creating a black hole that would swallow the world but is safely behind a desk writing this blog, bringing you the fantastical underbelly of nature... weird science.
