Rensselaer Republican, Volume 16, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 May 1884 — Birds That Do Not Fly. [ARTICLE]

Birds That Do Not Fly.

The most apparently distinctive feature of birds lies in the fact that they fly. It is this that gives them their feathers, thmr wings, and their peculiar bone strucAre. And yet, truism as such a statement sounds, there are a great many birds that do not fly—and it is among these terrestrial or swimniing kinds that we must look for the nearest modern approaches to the primitive bird type. From the very beginning birds had to endure the fieree competition of the mammals, which had been developed at a slightly earlier period, and they have for the most part taken almost entirely to the air, where alone they possess a distinct superiority over their mammalian compeers. There are certain spots, however, where mammals have been unable to penetrate, as in oceanic islands, and there are certain other spots which were insulated for a long period from the great continents, so that they possessed none of the higher classes of mammals, as in the case of Australia, South America, New Zealand, and South Africa. In these districts terrestrial birds had a chance which they had not in the great circumpolar land tract, now divided into two portions, North America on the west and Europe and Asia on the east. It is in Australia and the southern extremities of America and Africa, therefore, that we must look for the most antiquated forms of birds still surviving in the world at the present day. The decadent and now almost extinct order of struthious birds,- to which ostriches and cassowaries belong, supplies us with the best examples of such antique forms. These birds are all distinguished from every other known species, except the transitional Solenhofen creature and a few other old types, bv the fast that they have no fieel to the flat breastbone, a peculiarity which at once marks them out as not adapted for flight. Every one whose anatomical studies have been carried on as far as the carving of a chicken or a pheasant for dinner knows that the two halves of the breast are divided by a sharp keel or edge protruding from the breast-bone, but in the ostrich and their allies such a keel is wanting and the breast-bone is rounded and blunt. At one time these flat-chested birds were widely distributed over the whole wotld, for they are found in fossil forms from China to Peru, but as the mammalism race increased and multiplied and replenished the earth, only the best adapted keeled birds were able to hold their own against these four-legged competitors in the great continents.— Exchange.