Okay, but what about birds that can't fly?
E24. Flight is the thing we associate most with birds, so what does it mean when a lineage gives it up? Dr. Scott Edwards, Harvard, joins Scott to unpack how flightlessness evolves, why it keeps happening across the bird family tree, and what the genome reveals about how a bird loses the ability to fly.
In this episode you'll hear about:
How losing flight reshapes a bird's body, from feathers to forelimbs to that one famously enormous egg
Why the answer wasn't where geneticists expected to find it
What an extinct giant and a tiny tropical relative can tell us about where moa actually came…
The skinny
The skinny isn't ready yet — notes appear once the transcript is processed.