Why Can’t Some Birds Fly?

Birds like chickens, penguins and ostriches can’t fly, but it turns they were once able to. How did they lose this ability?

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Evolution Made Ridiculous Flightless Birds Over and Over
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfish/2014/05/22/evolution-made-ridiculous-flightless-birds-over-and-over/#.VuwvixIrLR1
“The ratites are a group of birds that includes the ostrich and emu, as well as the kiwi, rhea (like a smaller, South American ostrich), and cassowary (with a bright blue face and what looks like a toenail on its head).”

Big Flightless Birds Come From High-Flying Ancestors
http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=314617422
“ Scientists used to think all of these large, flightless birds descended from a large, flightless ancestor that lived millions of years ago when the southern hemisphere had a giant supercontinent. That supercontinent broke up - Africa drifted away, then India and South America.”

Genomic Support for a Moa-Tinamou Clade and Adaptive Morphological Convergence in Flightless Ratites
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2014/05/09/molbev.msu153.short?rss=1
“Phylogenetic analysis using standard homogeneous models and heterogeneous models robust to common topological artefacts recovered compelling support for ratite paraphyly with the little bush moa closest to tinamous within ratites.”

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