Cicadian rhythms set to perform live in Palm Coast this summer palmcoastobserver.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from palmcoastobserver.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Rearing cicadas eurekalert.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from eurekalert.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
In a genetic surprise, ancient DNA shows the closest family members of an extinct bird known as the Haitian cave-rail are not in the Americas, but Africa and the South Pacific, uncovering an unexpected link between Caribbean bird life and the Old World.
Like many animals unique to the Caribbean, cave-rails became extinct soon after people settled the islands. The last of three known West Indian species of cave-rails – flightless, chicken-sized birds – vanished within the past 1,000 years. Florida Museum of Natural History researchers sought to resolve the group’s long-debated ancestry by analyzing DNA from a fossil toe bone of the Haitian cave-rail, Nesotrochis steganinos. But they were unprepared for the results: The genus Nesotrochis is most closely related to the flufftails, flying birds that live in sub-Saharan Africa, Madagascar and New Guinea, and the adzebills, large, extinct, flightless birds native to New Zealand.