Thursday, July 10, 2025

Big Bird

The bird won't be making a comeback:
The emu is only distantly related to the giant moa. Both birds are members of the infraclass Palaeognathae, which includes five orders of birds, including the ratites, which include the flightless rheas, ostriches, cassowaries, and emus, as well as the tinamous of Latin America, which can fly. The moas, though, were members of the order Dinornithiformes, while emus are in the order Casuariiformes. In other words, they are not particularly closely related. Remember the whole dire wolf "de-extinction" thing? Same kind of problems here. The pups produced weren't dire wolves. They were genetically modified gray wolves. And the dire wolf is a member of the same subtribe as the gray wolf, the Canini. The emu and moa are connected at the infraclass level, several cladistic levels higher. So, a considerably more distant relation than dire wolf/gray wolf.
Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should...

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