Florian Maderspacher is Current Biology's Senior Reviews Editor.
Curr Biol. 2022 Oct 24;32(20):R1155-R1162. doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2022.09.039.
"There is no greater anomaly in nature than a bird that cannot fly" - thus spoke Richard Owen, towering figure of Victorian biology, second only to Charles Darwin, who related this quote in his Origin of Species. Owen, who later became a strident critic of Darwin's theory, knew what he was talking about. In 1839, he received a bone fragment from New Zealand. Through his superior anatomy skills, Owen inferred that this was the femur of a bird, but a bird that must have been incredibly big and hence unable to fly. As more bones arrived, Owen concluded that they belonged to a group of bird that we now know as 'moa', some of which stood almost twice as tall as him and were among the largest birds that ever lived (Figure 1).
“自然界中没有比不能飞翔的鸟更反常的现象了”——维多利亚生物学的杰出人物理查德·欧文曾这样说过，他仅次于查尔斯·达尔文，后者在他的《物种起源》中引用了这句话。欧文后来成为达尔文理论的激烈批评者，他知道自己在说什么。1839 年，他收到了一块来自新西兰的骨头碎片。通过他高超的解剖技能，欧文推断这是一只鸟的股骨，但这只鸟一定非常大，因此无法飞翔。随着更多的骨头到来，欧文得出结论，它们属于一种我们现在称之为“恐鸟”的鸟类，其中一些恐鸟的身高几乎是他的两倍，是有史以来最大的鸟类之一（图 1）。
