Perhaps no hiss so effectively displays its connection to dinosaur as thecassowary . These with child , flightless , and well - build up birds haunt the rainforest of New Guinea and northern Australia , earning the nickname " prehistorical execution volaille " and avoiding a lot of the scientific study that comes with more approachable locations .
Flinders University PhD studentPhoebe McInerneyconducted a field of one of the cassowary ’s lesser - know parts , its throat , and has tipped the balance in a debate about these mighty birds ' wide category Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree .
McInerney conduct a 3D image of the cassowary ’s throat using CT scans . Getting a bird that magnanimous andobstreperousto arrest still would have been challenging , but McInerney told IFLScience she was provided with the remains of an individual stumble by a car – a common fate in Far North Queensland .
The cassowary ’s syrinx , hyoid , and larynx are report in great item inBMC Evolutionary Biology , but it was when McInerney and co - author sought to widen their studies that thing got really interesting .
Visually , cassowaries are the closest survivor to New Zealand ’s extinct moa , which until their extinction 600 years ago were the largest hold up birds . On the other hand , familial analytic thinking suggested the moa were most intimately related to tinamou , shuttlecock that at first seem dead different . These inhabitants of Central and South America are small in size and can fly , even if they do n’t do it all that often .
“ The molecular data still has some issues but it is relatively reliable , " pronounce McInerney . Nevertheless , some traditional biologists had trouble accept the result , noting , in McInerney ’s words , that “ there was nothing similar between ” moa and tinamou .
McInerney and colleagues decided to equate their cassowary results with scans of moa neckparts , since the pharynx off-white can be found in many museum collections . The study revealed significant difference of opinion , but when McInerney go the comparison to tinamou , she found a much close match .
The ancestor of all these bird was presumptively flighted , excuse the journeys between Australia , New Zealand , and South America . In the first two , it encounter a niche for large , flightless birds and settle down in , with almost everything about the hereditary bird changing other than the shape of its inner throat .
The determination vindicates the familial analysis in this case , and arguably bolster it for other families where molecular resemblance battle with similarities in brute ' shapes . The work go out spread out the question of whether or not it is a co-occurrence that when given the opportunity these flight birds evolved multiple time into fairly interchangeable shape .
“ There seems to have been something about this grouping that they grew large and flightless everywhere they settled , ” sound out McInerney . Remote branches of the bird family Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree , such asterror birdsand Australia’sBullockornis(the duck of doom ) grew to similar sizes but did so far less often .
