Flightless birds

Abstract

"There is no greater anomaly in nature than a bird that cannot fly" - thus spoke Richard Owen, towering figure of Victorian biology, second only to Charles Darwin, who related this quote in his Origin of Species. Owen, who later became a strident critic of Darwin's theory, knew what he was talking about. In 1839, he received a bone fragment from New Zealand. Through his superior anatomy skills, Owen inferred that this was the femur of a bird, but a bird that must have been incredibly big and hence unable to fly. As more bones arrived, Owen concluded that they belonged to a group of bird that we now know as 'moa', some of which stood almost twice as tall as him and were among the largest birds that ever lived (Figure 1).