A previously lost species of bird has come back into existence, according to reports.
The Aldabra rail first went extinct around 136,000 years ago. Now, it’s re-emerged surprisingly.
Fossils on a Madagascan island revealed that the white-throated railbird went extinct when the island it was living on was submerged under the ocean.
Reportedly, when the island recovered, so did the island’s population of flightless birds.
According to the researchers from the University of Portsmouth and London’s Natural History Museum: rails once again losing the ability to fly due to an absence of predators on the island.
The land was submerged beneath the waves during a bout of global warming, was the reason for its demise.
The Aldabra atoll sunk under the waves, that killed all local flora and fauna including the rail, whose flightlessness would have stopped it from relocating.
Palaeontologists Julian Hume of the Natural History Museum and David Martill of the University of Portsmouth compared rail fossils from the situation of before the island sank with from after, at around 100,000 years ago.
They noticed that the rails that lived on the island after it came back out of the ocean had both wings and ankle bones, developing in the same direction.
‘These unique fossils provide irrefutable evidence that a member of the rail family colonized the Aldabra atoll, most likely from Madagascar, and became flightless independently on each occasion,’ said Dr. Hume.
‘We know of no other example in rails, or of birds in general, that demonstrates this phenomenon so evidently,’ said Professor Martill.
‘Only on Aldabra… is fossil evidence available that demonstrates the effects of changing sea levels on extinction and recolonization events,’ he added.
The Aldabra rail is the last flightless bird living in the Indian Ocean.
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