The picture is a white-throated rail, a chicken-sized bird indigenous to Madagascar which, according to new research, went extinct many thousands of years ago but came back into existence due to a rare process called “iterative evolution”.
The research, from the University of Portsmouth and Natural History Museum, found that on two occasions, separated by tens of thousands of years, a rail from the main island flew to an isolated atoll called Aldabra and then became flightless. The second surviving colony of flightless rails is still found on the atoll.
What’s this have to do with wolfhounds?
Well, the modern breed is essentially a recreation as well — iterative evolution at the hand of man resulting in parallel structures from the same ancestors, but at different times.
And who recreated the Irish Wolfhound? A Scotsman living in England!
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