Okay, but what about birds that can't fly?

E24. Flight is the thing we associate most with birds, so what does it mean when a lineage gives it up? Dr. Scott Edwards, Harvard, joins Scott to unpack how flightlessness evolves, why it keeps happening across the bird family tree, and what the genome reveals about how a bird loses the ability to fly.

In this episode you'll hear about:

• How losing flight reshapes a bird's body, from feathers to forelimbs to that one famously enormous egg
• Why the answer wasn't where geneticists expected to find it
• What an extinct giant and a tiny tropical relative can tell us about where moa actually came from

All audio, video, and images in this episode are either original to Okay, But... Birds (© Okay Media, LLC) or used under license/permission from the respective rights holders. Bird media from the Macaulay Library is used courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology as follows:

• Falkland Steamer-Duck audio contributed by Maurice A. E. Rumboll, ML4114
• Great Tinamou audio contributed by David L. Ross, Jr., ML57320