'Rare' ancestor reveals how huge flightless birds made it to faraway lands

 

Joel Kontinen

Do evolutionists believe in fossils or millions of years? Flightless birds could not travel to far away places. Yet they are found in six landmasses separated by oceans.

One idea was that the ancestors of this group of birds, known as paleognaths, just walked to those locations when most of the planet was harnessed together as the supercontinent Pangaea (320 million to 195 million years ago) and that, when this giant landmass split up, the birds were already in those locations.

The trouble is, the timing for that hypothesis is wrong. Pangaea had broken up by about 195 million years ago, creating the continents we know today. However, genetic studies have indicated that the last common ancestor of these paleognaths lived about 79.6 million years ago and that they divided into the main lineages we know today between about 70 million and 62 million years ago.

To work out what happened, Klara Widrig, a vertebrate zoologist at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., and her colleagues analyzed a specimen of the ancient paleognath Lithornis promiscuous. Although it lived around 59 to 56 million years ago, it is the oldest fossil palaeognath found in such pristine condition.

So in this area, fossils rule the time, when flightless birds evolved. However, if God created them at the beginning, then this surveys is foolish.

Source:

Chris Simms 2025 Huge flightless birds live the world over. Now we know how they got there —and it has to do with a 'rare' ancestor | Live Science September 17

Dinosaurs may have run like emus by keeping one foot on the ground

 

Emus always have one foot on the ground when running at an intermediate pace

Image courstesy of Imagebroker / Alamy Stock Photo

Joel Kontinen

How did dinosaurs run? According a new  study, they run like emus, which is strange.

“If you want to imagine a dinosaur running, then perhaps look at emus. They probably shared a similar posture, which makes it most energy efficient to keep one foot on the ground when running at an intermediate pace.

Pasha van Bijlert at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and his colleagues wanted to understand why birds have a style of running that is so different to humans.

For instance, emus (Dromaius novaehollandiae), which can sprint at up to 50 kilometres per hour, always have one foot on the ground when running at intermediate speeds. This was thought to require much more energy than the “aerial” running style, in which both feet are off the ground at the same time, which is seen in other bipeds, such as people.

To learn more, the scientists built a computer model based on an emu and used physics simulations to measure the energy output of different running styles, while varying the bird’s anatomy.

“These are all changes you can’t really make in a real bird, but they represent differences between different bird species,” says van Bijlert. “For example, quails are very crouched and their tendons probably don’t store a lot of energy. Emus are, comparatively, pretty upright, but their tendons store a lot of energy.”

But dinosaurs and emus have lots of differences, Emus are birds, and dinos are not. God created each species in its own way and dinos can never really run like emus.

Source:

James Woodford 2024  Dinosaurs may have run like emus by keeping one foot on the ground | New Scientist 25 September

Beak fossil upends bird evolutionary tree

 

Joel Kontinen

Darwinians do not know how birds evolved. now, a 57 —million— years old beak has written the tree of life of birds again. They say that most modern birds have   “flexible bony palates that allow them to move their upper beak independently of their skull.”

Only a few species, like emus, ostriches and kiwis — have fused palates and fixed beaks, They assumed that all modern birds like these, But a tiny bone suggests that flexiblejaws came first,  

Source: 

 

Benito, Juan et al. 2022, Cretaceous ornithurine supports a neognathous crown bird ancestor, Nature 612, 100–105.flexible jaws came first.   

Emu inspire robot uses less energy to run

 

Joel Kontinen

How do you make a robot run faster?

The solution is to use emu type legs. For instance,  “Alexander Badri-Spröwitz at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Stuttgart, Germany, and his colleagues have done away with the usual approach where every joint in a robotic limb” has that resembles the gait of an emu.

Emus are fast runners and giving their ability to robots makes the robots super fast. . 

biomimicry or biomimetics has recently become a success, that is, copying amazing design seen in nature, has become a flourishing research field.

Biomimicry is a science that brings out that what God has designed. And what he did, He did very well.

Design in nature is so obvious that it’s practically impossible to deny it.

Source: 

 Sparkes Matthew, 2022,  Watch emu-inspired robot legs that use less energy to run New Scientist 16 March.