Y'all should Google the article, it’s actually pretty neat. Basically, the Aldabra Atoll was once inhabited by the Aldabra Rail, a flightless species of bird that had diverged from the flying White-Throated Rail when a section of the population landed there and found they had no natural predators. However, the Atoll occasionally gets completely submerged, and all of the flightless Aldabra rails were wiped out. But then, after the Atoll re-emerged, a bunch of the EXACT SAME species of flying White Throated Rail decided to settle there again, and immediately proceeded to evolve into flightless birds AGAIN.
Just a reminder:the natural diet of these birds is BONES. Not just bone marrow; actual bone shards. They pick up huge freaking bones from carcasses and drop them onto rocks until they get spiky pieces and then they swallow them. Their stomach acid dissolves bone.
look me in the eye and tell me that’s not a fucking dragon
And they aren’t naturally red like that. That’s self-applied makeup. They find the reddest earth they can to work into their feathers as a status symbol.
And they don’t scavenge other parts of carcases, just the bones. 85-90% of their diet is exclusively bone. Hence why it’s only a myth that these birds would just pick up whole lambs and carry them off. It’s not true, but in German they’re still called Lämmergeier as a result.
Honestly, my first thought was “dinosaur” when I saw these. Never knew any leads to the species name, though.
