A bird that went extinct over 100,000 years ago has "re-evolved" into existence

The Aldabra white-throated rail, a flightless bird that lives on its namesake atoll in the Indian Ocean, doesn’t look like anything special at first glance. But the small bird has big bragging rights, because it has effectively evolved into existence twice after first going extinct some 136,000 years ago.

According to a study published Wednesday in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, the rail is an example of a rarely observed phenomenon called iterative evolution, in which the same ancestral lineage produces parallel offshoot species at different points in time. This means that near-identical species can pop up multiple times in different eras and locations, even if past iterations have gone extinct.

Fossils of the flightless bird were found both before and after Albadra was submerged by an “inundation event” that occurred around 136,000 years ago, said study authors Julian Hume, an avian paleontologist at Natural History Museum in London, and David Martill, a paleobiologist at the University of Portsmouth.

Those rising sea levels wiped out the first iteration of the flightless rail, which was descended from flying forebears that originated in the Seychelles Islands and Madagascar. Amazingly, the same parent species appears to have recolonized the atoll once it emerged from under the waves tens of thousands of years later.

The fossils indicate that the new rail was evolving toward flightlessness again at the time, as the absence of predators on Aldabra rendered the ability obsolete.

smelly-bandit wrote:God bless climate change, praise be to Al gore and global warming, this bird would have been lost forever if not for unnatural climate change

More c02 for the win

Ben Reilly wrote:

smelly-bandit wrote:God bless climate change, praise be to Al gore and global warming, this bird would have been lost forever if not for unnatural climate change

More c02 for the win

The island was uncovered 10,000 years ago, so that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution by a few years or so. Climate change, as the Bush administration (not Gore) decided to call it¹, is actually working to cover the island back up in water again, as it has already done so many other islands².

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/09/09/new-study-finds-8-islands-swallowed-by-rising-sea-level/#2dfb15ed5283

smelly-bandit wrote:

Ben Reilly wrote:

The island was uncovered 10,000 years ago, so that pre-dates the Industrial Revolution by a few years or so. Climate change, as the Bush administration (not Gore) decided to call it¹, is actually working to cover the island back up in water again, as it has already done so many other islands².

1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2003/mar/04/usnews.climatechange

2: https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/09/09/new-study-finds-8-islands-swallowed-by-rising-sea-level/#2dfb15ed5283

Climate change predated the industrial revolution as well, by millions of years.

Ever heard of the ICE AGE???

Ice melts when the temperature goes up, the ice ended due to rising temps long long long before the industrial revolution

But I'm sure you have SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!! to offer some excuse why it's different

WhoseYourWolfie wrote:

smelly-bandit wrote:

Climate change predated the industrial revolution as well, by millions of years.

Ever heard of the ICE AGE???

Ice melts when the temperature goes up, the ice ended due to rising temps long long long before the industrial revolution

But I'm sure you have SCIENCE!!!!!!!!!!! to offer some excuse why it's different

Which "ice age" would that be then,  SmellyNo_clue  ???

There have been quite a few ice ages over the years..

Several just over tha last 200,000 years of human history.