Which came first — the chicken or the egg?
It’s inside an egg that genes combine to code for an individual, so we’re going to go with ‘the egg.’ Next question, please.
Which came first — the ostrich or the emu?
Looking at pictures of these flightless birds, you’d be forgiven for mistaking them for kissing cousins. They’re both swift-footed birds with buns of feathers hitched high — alluring outfits that show off their slender legs and necks.
But they’re not as closely related as they might at first seem.
Ostriches and emus are both ratites — members of a group of large flightless birds endemic to the Southern Hemisphere. Ratites were all thought to have descended from a common ancestor; examples of what scientists dub vicariance biogeography, or convergent evolution, in which members of once-conjoined populations become geographically separated, such as through the geological manifestation of a new river, gulf, or mountain, and then pursue their own evolutionary trajectories. In the case of ratites, they were thought to have gone their separate ways following the bust-up of Gondwana, from where their presumed ancestor was thought to have hailed.
Just a decade ago, in his book The Ancestor’s Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution, famed biologist and writer Richard Dawkins described ratites as a “truly natural” group. “Ostriches, emus, cassowaries, rheas, kiwis, moas and elephant birds really are more closely related to each other than they are to any other birds,” he wrote. “And their shared ancestor was flightless too.”
Dawkins’ statement reflected leading science from the time. But advances in molecular phylogenetics have since revealed the folly of longheld assumptions about ratite evolution. The apparent similarities between different species of ratites are now thought to have been the consequence of convergent evolution — the independent evolution of similar features by different species in far-flung places that inhabit similar ecological niches.
It seems that flightlessness just makes sense in the right environments. Research in recent years has revealed that selection pressures independently pushed the forebears of today’s ratites to shrink their wings, bloat their bodies, flatten their sternums, and evacuate the skies.
Several years ago, University of Florida researchers used BUCKy software to analyze the genomes of various birds, and found that the ratite family tree includes a surprising cousin — tinamous, an order of grouse-resembling birds from Central and South America. These birds spend much of their lives on the ground, but many of the species are perfectly capable of flying. The tanimous were found to be more closely related to emus then they were to ostriches, providing further evidence of the independent evolution of flightlessness in different ratites. The findings were published in the journal Systematic Biology:
“The independent evidence we obtained provided strong corroboration of the hypothesis that nonostrich paleognaths form a clade,” wrote the three scientists involved with the research in their paper. “This sharply alters our understanding of the evolutionary history of the flightless ratites by providing support for multiple losses of flight. It remains possible there was a single loss of flight early in paleognath history followed by a regain of flight in tinamous, but this is unlikely because the loss of flight appears to be a relatively easy transition for birds whereas the loss followed by the regain of flight has never been documented. The hypothesis that flight has been lost multiple times in the ratites suggests that some of the most distinctive morphological characters in ratites arose through convergent evolution.”
We asked one of the authors of the paper, Edward Braun, an associate professor in the university’s biology department, how this information and similar analyses could help answer our question. Which species is older — the emu or the ostrich?
Braun said that’s a tough question to answer; but he suggested a couple of alternatives, which he then answered.
“One valid question is, ‘When did ostriches start looking like ostriches, and when did emus start looking like emus?'” Braun said. “I suspect that, if the question is asked that way, the answer is, ‘About the same length of time.'”
“On the other hand, another way of asking the question is, ‘When did ostriches separate from other extant birds, relative to emus?’ The answer to that is clear. Ostriches have no close relatives. Ostriches separated from other birds a long time ago; probably in the Paleocene [66 to 56 million years ago], since there are middle Eocene fossils that are probably now extinct parts of the ostrich lineage. Emus are more closely related to rheas, kiwis, and quite close to cassowaries.”
Enjoy this fun video of emus and an ostrich playing with a motorized ball, which helps to reveal differences in the appearances of the species:
source => http://wonkonthewildlife.com/how-are-emus-related-to-ostriches/
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