Not recently , of course . But what about their ancestors ? The motion is : Did the flightless fowl of today , a family known as Ratites , evolve from flightless birds of yore or did their airborne ancestors lose the ability to fly over the millennium ?
Researchhas show that Struthio camelus ' wings are not just ornamental , but rather assist the beast — and some other , if not all large , flightless birds — asseverate their symmetry and simulated military operation when feed at eminent speeds . This would support the opening that these seemingly useless wings are not of necessity vestigial and , therefore , that the birds never had the ability to vaporize .
This fits the long - held guess that ratite bird evolve around 200 million years ago when Australia , New Zealand , South America , Africa , Antarctica , Madagascar , and India were merged into a supercontinent known as Gondwana . As shifting tectonic plate fracture Gondwana apart , the ancestral giant flightless birds were separated from each other and finally evolved into the ostriches , emus , and New Zealand ’s recently extinct jumbo moa .
However , one question rest : How do you reconcile an ancient flightless bird with the existence of dinosaur , who would have made speedy study of ground - bound fair game ? The answer is , you do n’t . Fossil grounds supported the account that Ratites evolved around 65 million years ago , just as the dinosaurs were dying out . But by then , the continents had already break aside , upending the existing theory that all the contemporary Ratites evolved from the same flightless ancestor .
The author with an ostrich . Can confirm , he did not vaporize .
More recent researchled by Dr. Matthew Phillips , an ARC Postdoctoral Fellow at the ANU Research School of Biology , addressed this number and incur that , in fact , ratite dispersed across the Continent at a fourth dimension when their wingswereused for flight and , from there , severally evolved to be large and flightless once the extinction of the dinosaur removed the pressure to escape to high ground .
“ Our subject area suggests that the flighted ascendant of Ratites appear to have been ground - feeding fowl that take to the woods well , " Phillips write . " So the extinction of the dinosaur in all likelihood lifted predation atmospheric pressure that had previously select for flight and its necessary constraint , small size . Lifting of this press and more abundant forage opportunities would then have selected for large sizing and sequent loss of flight of stairs . ”
