The Strangeness Of Ostriches

Strangeness and the Common Os-trich Struthio camelus go back all the way to the big bird’s beginnings some 200 million years ago, when dinosaurs shrank and miraculously metamorphosed into birds.

- Mitch Reardon

In silhouette, the world’s largest living bird bears a striking resemblance to an ornithomimid, a member of a group of slender theropod dinosaurs that flourished about 230 million years ago. Like Ostriches, they had long hind limbs and a flexible neck ending in a small, beaked head. Some early paleontologists advanced the theory that this tall, flightless ‘bird mimic lizard’ was the ancestor of the ratites, a collection of mostly large (except for the Kiwi), flightless birds that include the Ostrich, Rhea, Emu and Cassowary, plus the extinct moas of New Zealand, as well as Madagascar’s giant Elephant Bird. Evolutionary scientists further proposed that the various ratite species were scattered across the planet by continental drift.

However, not all their colleagues supported all of that hypothesis. They agreed dinosaur fossils that showed birdlike traits such as feathers, air sacs and light bones clarified the evolutionary kinship of birds and dinosaurs. But, they pointed out, fossil evidence also showed that Ostriches and other ratite relatives evolved between 70 and 60 million years ago, by which time the continents had already broken apart, upending the original dispersal theory.