Word: flightless
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DIED. BRUNO ZEHNDER, 51, Swiss-born, penguin-snapping photographer; in a blizzard that surprised him as he filmed his flightless friends; in Antarctica. Zehnder, who legally changed his middle name to Penguin, shot TIME's Jan. 15, 1990, cover on Antarctica...
Since 1968, Gerald Kooyman of the University of California at San Diego has studied emperor penguins, beguiling flightless birds that are dependent on Antarctic sea ice. The penguins need 255 days of sea ice in order to complete the cycle from egg laying to the stage when fledglings are hardy enough to begin their wanderings through the southern ocean. Typically, the young birds jump into the water only two weeks or so before the ice breaks up. This year, says Kooyman, the ice near Franklin Island broke up in mid-December, two weeks before the fledglings were ready to embark...
...ones that flew, drifted, swam or were carried there. Ninety-five percent of the reptiles, 50% of the birds, 42% of the land plants, 70% to 80% of the insects and 17% of the fish live nowhere else in the world. Among them: giant tortoises, Galapagos penguins, waved albatrosses, flightless cormorants, Galapagos fur seals, seagoing iguanas, three types of rice rat, Galapagos bats--and 13 species of Darwin's finch, whose variously shaped beaks, perfectly adapted for the foods they subsist on, were used by the scientist to illustrate his theory of evolution...
Surprises crop up constantly. The latest: a new species from Mongolia, announced last week by Norell and several U.S. and Mongolian scientists. Known as Mononychus (meaning one claw), the turkey-size animal looked like a modern, flightless bird, complete with feathers, but had bone structures characteristic of both birds and dinosaurs. Its discovery cements the bird- dinosaur link even more firmly...
There are researchers skeptical, of course, about how Mononychus is labeled and about the larger question of how dinosaurs are related to birds. But since scientists cannot really decide for sure whether Mononychus should be considered a primitive flightless bird or a dinosaur, it seems plausible that there is really no essential distinction: it was both...