Aldabra rail

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About Aldabra rail:

Scientific name: Dryolimnas cuvieri aldabranus
It lives on a coral atoll off the southeast coast of Africa.
Appearance: It’s about the size of a chicken, with a flecked gray back, a rusty red head and chest and a white throat.
It is a subspecies of the white-throated rail (Dryolimnas cuvieri) and is the only living flightless bird in the Indian Ocean.
In losing its ability to fly once again, the Aldabra rail has essentially evolved twice, rising from the dead through a process called iterative evolution.
A 2019 study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society examined the fossil record of rails in Aldabra and found evidence of a flightless rail on the atoll from before it was submerged beneath the waves 136,000 years ago.

What is Iterative evolution?

Iterative evolution can be defined as “the repeated evolution of a specific trait or body plan from the same ancestral lineage at different points in time.

Q1: What is an atoll ?

It is a ring-shaped coral reef, island, or series of islets. An atoll surrounds a body of water called a lagoon. Sometimes, atolls and lagoons protect a central island. Channels between islets connect a lagoon to the open ocean or sea.

Source:Aldabra rail: The bird that came back from the dead by evolving twice