Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Chris Greenough, Professor of Social Sciences, Edge Hill University

As UK fans prepare to sit down for the seventh series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, it is worth asking what the competition format really offers drag. Since first airing in the US in 2009, Drag Race has grown into a global brand.

RuPaul has achieved global drag domination with 20 localised versions, bringing the total number of contestants worldwide to over 600. The series has brought drag unprecedented visibility. Yet across these platforms, the same issues of representation keep appearing.

My work with performer and researcher Mark Edward traces how drag has been used to fight censorship, challenge colonial law, mobilise against AIDS, critique apartheid and demand trans liberation.

It does seem like overt politics and activism are not seen as “sellable”. Mass appeal and commercial viability must be a concern when there is a whole series of linked product lines, tours, cosmetics, podcasts, merchandise, conventions and brand endorsements. The Conversation contacted the production company behind Ru Paul’s Drag Race, World of Wonder, for comment but it did not respond.

Yet beyond the show, drag performers continue to lead activist initiatives. Black and brown queens have drawn attention to systemic racism, while others have used drag for causes such as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, drag nuns, who campaign for sexual health and HIV awareness. Or performers campaigning for environmental concerns and veganism.

Drag Race also represents, recognises and rewards certain kinds of drag over others. Across its franchises, queens (note, only queens and not kings) who embody a polished, high-femme aesthetic tend to flourish. Contestants who work outside these conventions, whether through performance art, body non-conformity or alternative drag, often struggle to be recognised.

Read more:
Lily Savage: how Paul O’Grady helped embed drag in the British mainstream

Drag kings, assigned female at birth (AFAB) performers and trans and non-binary performers are absent or under-represented from the show’s casting and representation. Drag researcher Ami Pomerantz writes about the tokenism in the selection of fat performers on the show. While, political scientist Ash Kayte Stokoe discusses representations of ethnicity and prejudice against non-native speakers of English across the competitions.

Read more:
RuPaul’s Drag Race: how social media made drag’s subversive art form into a capitalist money maker

Disabled performers are also largely absent. When they do appear, disability is often hidden, downplayed or framed as personal struggle. In the US series, Yvie Oddly waited until halfway through season 11 to reveal her hypermobility condition. Tamisha Iman (US season 13) competed with an ostomy bag following cancer treatment. In the UK, Ginny Lemon (UK season 2) explained their fibromyalgia prevented them from wearing heels, and later left the show.

But outside of the show, there are disabled performers such as Drag Syndrome the world’s first drag troupe featuring drag artists with Down’s syndrome.

Drag has been about transcending and parodying rigid gender structures and in the wider drag world there is more diversity to be found. For instance, The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula has presented itself as an alternative to such performances, celebrating horror and filth.

Read more:
Drag culture may be mainstream but its forms are constantly evolving

Drag theorist Nick Cherryman describes tranimal perfomers, those who use interpretive, animalistic, and post-modern expressions of drag to transcend the human-animal binary.

Drag has long been sustained by community. In 18th-century Britain, molly houses like Mother Clap’s in Holborn, London, gave gay men and gender-nonconforming people space to parody rituals, gossip and bond. They often called each other “mother” and “daughter” – a precursor to today’s drag families. A century later, New York’s ballroom scene created chosen families led by house mothers such as Pepper LaBeija, offering shelter to youth rejected elsewhere.

The competition format of Drag Race reorders these priorities. Performers in competition, weekly eliminations, cliffhanger edits and rivalries are formatted for television, not for community.

The problem is structural. Television formats demand tension, pacing and clear winners. What gets lost is drag’s ethos of kinship and solidarity.

The contrast is clear. On television, activism is transformed into digestible content, stripping drag of the radical force it historically carried. Off screen, it remains a daily practice of protest and survival for LGBTQ+ communities.

The impact of RuPaul’s Drag Race is undeniable. It has made certain forms of drag visible and popular. Yet, drag’s visibility should not be confused with representation. By privileging certain aesthetics and the dominance of queens, the competition format constrains as much as it celebrates.

As season seven of the UK franchise begins, viewers will once again enjoy the glamour and talent of British queens. But the bigger question lingers across the franchise: can drag on television hold onto its diversity and political edge?

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Chris Greenough does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. RuPaul’s Drag Race: how mainstream drag is losing its political, activist and community focus – https://theconversation.com/rupauls-drag-race-how-mainstream-drag-is-losing-its-political-activist-and-community-focus-266011

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Nicholas Beuret, Lecturer in Management and Ecological Sustainability, University of Essex

The rolling mills are still working, but the furnaces are long cold. Of the 4,000 people previously employed at the steel mill in Port Talbot, Wales, only half still work there. Despite union protests and local rallies, one year ago on September 30 2024, the plant’s last coal-burning blast furnace was shut down.

This ended more than a century of steelmaking in the UK’s biggest plant – one of the largest in Europe. The owner, Tata Steel, blamed high energy prices and competition from cheaper Chinese steel, claiming ongoing losses of around £1 million a day. It warned the plant would close entirely unless the UK government stepped in to help replace its ageing furnaces with lower-emissions electric arc furnaces.

Steel manufacture contributes around 7% of global climate emissions, and Port Talbot alone accounted for 1.5% of the UK total. Faced with the choice between the closure of the mill and supporting its transition to greener production, the government committed £500 million to this transition.

Tata Steel then announced 2,800 job losses – around one in ten jobs in the town of 35,000. Up to 9,500 more could be lost in the supply chain and broader sector.

This is not how successive governments have sold the transition to a net zero economy. Both Labour and the Conservatives promised net zero would create skilled, well-paid work that would not only make up for losses elsewhere, but generate economic growth and lower bills.

Some data suggests they were right: the UK’s net zero sector is growing far faster than the rest of the economy at 10% per year, and already supports close to 700,000 jobs.

However, polling shows only about one in five voters think the energy transition will create jobs in their area, while only one in three think the transition will have a positive impact on jobs anywhere in the UK.

So why does no one believe the politicians? And where are the jobs?

A series of betrayals

Partly this is about geography. Old centres of industry like Port Talbot are struggling to retain jobs, while net zero businesses tend to be far more dispersed nationally, with many in London and the south-east. As the transition progresses, industrial towns will feel even more abandoned.

The jobs themselves are also different. Many new net zero jobs are in installation, waste processing and other services, often for small businesses and with worse working conditions than those that predominate in heavy industry.

Even within heavy industry, low-carbon technologies tend to mean fewer jobs, as greener versions generally employ fewer workers. Electric furnaces need less labour than coal-burning furnaces, for instance. Facilities tend to be more automated, and supply chains are shorter.

And where there could be a pipeline from fossil fuel jobs to renewable industries, as in Scotland, most workers say there is far too little support from government and industry for them to make this change.

Political fallout

Reform has been quick to seize on the closure of Port Talbot, with its leader Nigel Farage declaring he’d open the furnaces again, despite this being physically impossible.

Reform more generally has declared net zero to be an expensive farce, one that costs jobs and drives up energy bills. Across a swathe of local councils where Reform has overall control, it has promised to cancelled net zero policies and renewable energy projects.

Though critics suggest Reform’s promises threaten billions in investment and upwards of 1 million jobs, the party’s claims are finding a welcome home among workers in industry, with unions warning that their members are increasingly drawn to Reform as they desert Labour.

The steel industry isn’t the only one undergoing job losses. From oil and gas facilities to fertiliser and car plants, heavy industry is shedding jobs under pressure from high energy costs, competition, and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. As the transition continues, these losses are likely to mount.

The household budget myth

It is not just the “jobs gap” that generates the sense of betrayal among workers. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the myth that the UK government’s finances work in the same way as a household budget, thus justifying one of the most dramatic programs of government austerity seen among the world’s wealthier countries, has become a well-established common-sense framework.

And this mindset associated with austerity has also come to haunt the UK’s net zero transition.

Surveys repeatedly list local decline as among the main reasons why people are turning away from the major parties and towards Reform. And when the UK government hands hundreds of millions to companies like Nissan or Tata Steel, only for them to cut hundreds of jobs, this feeds a sense that money is flowing to corporations, not communities.

Reform has capitalised on this by contrasting supposed subsidies for solar farms with the closure of vital services in those same towns and regions. When combined with the steady flow of commentaries in the right-wing media declaring net zero a burden on the taxpayer and a waste of scarce government resources, the narrative that net zero is a “con”, taking money and jobs from the British public to give to big business, seems more credible.

The bitter irony here is that not only do most people in the UK, including most Reform supporters, still back taking action on climate change, but that climate change will hit deprived areas hardest. Yet without visible local benefits, warnings about future risks won’t cut through.

One year on from the Port Talbot closure, I believe it’s vital that the net zero transition comes to mean something more than broken promises and betrayed communities. Reform’s anti-net zero rhetoric is no panacea. Yet without a program to ensure a just transition, we risk this becoming hostage to such reactions – a transition to nowhere that anyone wants to go.

Nicholas Beuret does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Port Talbot, one year on: steelworks closure shows why public is losing trust in net zero – https://theconversation.com/port-talbot-one-year-on-steelworks-closure-shows-why-public-is-losing-trust-in-net-zero-265906

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Matthew Powell, Teaching Fellow in Strategic and Air Power Studies, University of Portsmouth

An increasing number of drones have been spotted around Denmark’s airports in recent weeks. The most recent incidents around Aalborg and Billund airport caused considerable disruption followed as scheduled flights were prevented from landing or taking off.

These incidents follow several others, including at Copenhagen Airport. This is similar to the disruption that was experienced around London Gatwick airport in 2023, again causing widespread disruption.

In addition to drones being spotted around civilian airports, there have also been sightings around military airbases where the Danish F-16 and F-35 combat aircraft are based.

A civilian drone flights have been banned for a week in advance of a European Union summit in Copenhagen on October 1.

Given the widespread disruption that has been caused, questions are now being raised about what can be done to either suppress or destroy drones and prevent future attacks. There is also a risk to civilian aircraft from mid-air collisions with the drones and the potential for civilian deaths and injuries.

Read more:
Zelensky says a destructive drone arms race looms – but dystopia isn’t inevitable

The Danish government has claimed that these most recent drone flights have been conducted by someone trying to spread fear among the Danish population. There have also been claims that they are part of wider Russian hybrid operations, which aims to disrupt Danish defence.

Suspicions of increased Russian activity has been fostered by an increasing number of incursions by drones into several other nations’ airspace This is something that has been strenuously denied by the Kremlin.

Lasers, bullets and missiles

Ukrainian forces have used fishing nets to try to catch Russian drones deployed against their positions. Some drones have even been engineered to fire nets in a bid to snag other drones.

Another way of reducing or removing this relatively new threat is to directly shoot down the drones that are around the airspace of airports and airbases. This could potentially be done with combat aircraft, but also with high-powered lasers. But this is not as straightforward as it sounds.

One of the biggest challenges in taking this action is that it usually requires new legislation to be passed by national parliaments. Even with emergency legislation this can take time, meaning that it is not the immediate response to the threat that is clearly necessary. Similar legislation to that being considered by the Danish parliament was passed in the UK in 2018.

But once legislation has been passed the challenges do not end. Given the relatively small size of the drones causing the disruption, they can often be very difficult to target through traditional military means. Even if drones can be targeted, an additional risk is then posed – when a drone is shot out of the sky, there is little control over its trajectory as it falls to earth.

Once destroyed, it could easily land on airport infrastructure, on civilian property or in a worst-case scenario on people, causing injury or death.

Decisions whether to target drones causing this disruption must therefore be taken after a great deal of thought and consideration,. But other methods are available and new technologies are being developed that may provide more effective solutions in the future.

Jamming technology

Instead of using so-called kinetic methods to physically destroy drones that are posing this problem, the use of jamming technology could be used to disrupt the communications link between the drone and the operator. As with kinetic attack, this response poses the challenge of what happens to the drone itself once the signal has been jammed and it falls out of the sky.

There are, however, several advantages to this approach. The first and most important advantage is that jamming can work for relatively long distances. This, disincentivises further attacks as, in theory at least, any drone being flown cannot get within sufficient range to cause the level of disruption that has been seen in Denmark.

In addition to this, the lack of physical destruction from kinetic engagement means that, in theory at least, the drone can be recovered and information about its operation and whether it is a civilian or military asset can be discovered.

But using jamming technology to prevent drones from flying around civilian airports and military airbases has its own drawbacks. Jamming technology, as it is currently exists, cannot be targeted against individual aircraft. This means that any other aircraft within the vicinity of the airport or airbase where jamming technology is being used is also vulnerable to disruption. Due to this, closure of airspace would still be required to remove the threat of the drone, but this should be for a vastly reduced amount of time than is currently required.

There are, however, potential future technologies that might be incorporated into the defence of civilian airports and military airspaces. One such technology is currently being developed by the Royal Navy and has been named DragonFire. This uses the power of a long-range laser to physically destroy a drone in the sky from distances of up to three miles.

A further technology that is being developed by the British army, is jamming technology that can be directed on to targets with greater precision than is currently available outside of the British military.

These new technologies will take time to be widely used in civilian applications. So the sort of disruption we’ve been seeing lately will probably continue in the near future.

Matthew Powell does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How can Europe fight back against incursions by drone aircraft? – https://theconversation.com/how-can-europe-fight-back-against-incursions-by-drone-aircraft-266256

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Christopher Pich, Associate Professor in Marketing, University of Nottingham

Labour is holding its 2025 conference against a backdrop of Andy Burnham, mayor of Manchester, calling for “wholesale change”. Burnham is making a clear attempt to use the government’s record of scandal, u-turn and general identity crisis as fuel for his own leadership bid. But he is far from alone in attacking Keir Starmer’s Labour for lacking ideological clarity.

Starmer and his team have repeatedly tried to reset the party’s image, reframe its message, and reassure voters that Labour represents competence, stability and pragmatic change. These efforts have amounted to two of the three classic branding strategies: brand repair and brand reboot.

Labour has so far stopped short of the third and most consequential option: a full brand overhaul. But this is precisely what is now required. Surface-level resets and tactical communication tweaks cannot solve a deeper problem: voters remain unclear about Labour’s ideological core, its long-term vision, and its promise to UK voters.

Unless the party embraces a bold, comprehensive rebranding strategy – one that redefines who it is, what it stands for, and why it matters – Labour’s historic return to power risks becoming a short-lived chapter rather than the foundation of a durable political future.

In politics, as in business, repairing a brand involves rebuilding trust by returning to old positioning – in Labour’s case, competence and accountability – and apologising for past mistakes. This approach often involves messaging changes, policy tweaks or symbolic gestures.

Rebooting entails shifting the narrative, such as toward innovation, younger voters or new priorities, even if it risks alienating some traditional supporters.

Brand replacement (the overhaul option) means launching a fundamental rebrand with a new narrative, visual identity, messaging platform – and possibly leadership. This would be a radical reset aimed at shedding old baggage and redefining what the party stands for.

The resets and reboots to date

To be fair to Starmer, he hasn’t sat by idly in the face of this problem. He has attempted to recapture and rearticulate his political brand.

A reset strategy emerged in May, following the dismal results of England’s local elections and Labour’s defeat to Reform UK in the Runcorn byelection. The reset was designed to reassure voters that Starmer understood why people had turned away from the party at the polls. In an attempt to clarify his message, he vowed to go “further and faster” in delivering change.

However, it had little impact in reviving the fortunes of the Labour brand. Voters remained unconvinced the party could address deep-rooted societal issues.

This initial reset strategy, an attempt at a classic form of brand repair, failed for a simple reason: it was too superficial. Rather than articulating a bold new direction, the messaging focused narrowly on “delivery” and competence, without addressing deeper questions about identity or purpose.

Resetting the message does little if the audience no longer trusts the messenger. Voters weren’t rejecting Starmer for being unclear about logistics – they were rejecting a party that still hadn’t told them who it was and what it believed in.

Starmer had to bring forward the implementation of the second rebranding strategy in the wake of the downfall of the deputy prime minister, Angela Rayner: a brand reboot in mid-September. Broader than the repair-reset strategy, this involved an attempt to clarify Labour’s message, communicating clear dividing lines with its political competitors including Reform and the Conservatives.

Starmer wanted to demonstrate he had the answers to the big issues of concern to the British public: immigration, welfare and the cost of living. This was supported by a cabinet reshuffle, which sought to demonstrate that the most effective ministers with the right personalities were in charge to “deliver, deliver, deliver”.

However, news of this reboot was quickly drowned out by fresh controversy around the now sacked UK-US Ambassador Peter Mandelson, who had been close friends with Jeffrey Epstein.

Go big or go home

In truth, neither of these previous efforts represented a real reset or reboot in the branding sense. Both were reactive attempts to contain crises and manage headlines. They were not proactive efforts to rebuild the party’s underlying narrative architecture.

A full overhaul would be risky, but may now be the only option left. And Labour has been here before. Between 1992 and 1997, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown implemented a major rebrand of Labour – and secured three election wins.

In business, a full brand overhaul is typically done when an organisation wants to fundamentally change how it is perceived, or reach out to an entirely different customer base. International brands to have taken this path include Airbnb, Burberry, Shell and Altria (formerly Phillip Morris), as well as Facebook, which shifted to being Meta, and Dunkin’ Donuts, which became simply Dunkin’.

Sometimes, a full brand overhaul strategy is adopted to respond to deep crises, to rebuild after failed resets, or to modernise. It must include both style and substance.

The risk is that a total overhaul can alienate parts of the existing customer base and create internal divisions. It can spark accusations of inauthenticity or opportunism.

But these risks can be mitigated if the brand overhaul is grounded in genuine substance, not just cosmetic changes. For Labour, that means linking it to real policy priorities, and communicating consistently and transparently about what the party stands for.

Labour keeps repainting the walls but the foundations are crumbling. A meaningful overhaul would begin with articulating a clear, values-driven vision for Britain that goes beyond technocratic “delivery” to offer a sense of purpose and direction.

It would involve aligning party messaging, policy and leadership around this vision, so that every communication reinforces the same story. And it would see leadership involving party members, communities and voters in the process – turning a top-down rebrand into a collaborative renewal. Done right, a bold reimagining of Labour’s identity could not only restore trust, but secure its place as the natural party of government for a generation.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. No more resets, reboots and reshuffles: brand experts on why Labour now needs a total overhaul – https://theconversation.com/no-more-resets-reboots-and-reshuffles-brand-experts-on-why-labour-now-needs-a-total-overhaul-266127

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Marwan Izzeldin, Senior Lecturer in Economics, Lancaster University

The £2.2 billion plan for a second runway at London’s Gatwick airport has divided opinion over environmental concerns and its ability to kickstart the economic growth the UK so badly needs. Critics have said that the economic benefits are overstated and the environmental harms unavoidable.

These concerns – including from leading economists – are an important part of the debate. But they don’t tell the whole story. Looking at Gatwick’s northern runway proposal in particular, the evidence suggests that expansion can improve safety, reduce waste and deliver real benefits to travellers and the local community. As long as it is managed responsibly, of course.

Gatwick is Europe’s busiest single-runway airport, handling more than 43 million passengers a year and around 260,000 aircraft movements on just one operational runway.

This creates bottlenecks – during peak hours, aircraft go into “holding stacks” (vertical formations of planes that circle until it’s their turn to land). A typical Boeing 737 burns 2.5 to three tonnes of jet fuel per hour, so just 15 minutes of unnecessary holding adds nearly a tonne of CO₂ emissions into the atmosphere.

With an average of 3.24 minutes lost per flight into Gatwick in holding stacks and to other inefficiencies, the waste is significant, both environmentally and economically. Economists call this a “congestion externality”. That is, costs imposed on society with no corresponding benefit. Adding runway capacity directly reduces these inefficiencies.

Critics argue that more flights automatically mean more emissions. Yet the data show that efficiency matters too. Absorbing delays at cruise altitude rather than in low-level holding stacks has been shown to cut waste significantly.

At Gatwick, an arrival management scheme introduced in 2019 was expected to save more than 26,000 minutes of holding per year. If realised, this would translate into around 1,200 tonnes of fuel and 3,800 tonnes of CO₂ avoided annually.

Pairing those measures with the northern runway – which reduces stacking – compounds the savings. In welfare terms, this is a clear case of lowering emissions intensity per movement (a more useful measure than a company’s overall emissions). It should ensure that growth is not just about more traffic but also cleaner, more efficient traffic.

The case for consumers

There are also important consumer benefits. Gatwick competes heavily in the leisure and short-haul market, where families are most sensitive to price. By expanding to two runways, airlines will be able to schedule more services at peak times, bringing down fares.

Research shows that a scarcity of slots adds a premium to air fares. At Europe’s busiest airports – which include Gatwick – it’s estimated that by 2035 congestion will add €10.42 (£9.10) on average to each ticket.

Expansion also supports local and national economies. Gatwick forecasts that the northern runway project could create 14,000 jobs and contribute nearly £1 billion a year to the regional economy.

These jobs span construction, airport operations, tourism and supply chains, directly benefiting communities in the south-east of England. It’s what economists call a distributional gain – the benefits are spread broadly through employment and regional growth, rather than to a narrow group.

Of course, the costs – noise, air quality and climate – cannot be ignored and will have to be managed. Expansion plans retain the strict 11pm-6am night flight quota, implement quieter continuous descent operations (a technique that allows planes to descend more smoothly, creating less noise), and aim to encourage more travellers to arrive at the airport by rail.

Around 44% of Gatwick passengers already arrive by train, and it has more direct train connections than any other European airport.

With timetable integration and new fare types, Gatwick aims to push the percentage of passengers arriving and leaving by rail well above 50%. This would cut road traffic emissions. It is an attempt to ensure that those who generate environmental costs (airlines and airports) also bear responsibility for reducing them.

The real test is not whether Gatwick grows, but how it grows. With verifiable baselines – such as average stack minutes per arrival, go-around rates (where pilots abandon a landing attempt and circle back), and CO₂ per movement – expansion can be monitored and airport bosses held to account.

If the promised gains are delivered, the net effect could include safer skies, lower emissions intensity, cheaper fares, more jobs and stronger regional growth. Welfare economics teaches us that policy should maximise the wellbeing of the many, not preserve the convenience of a few. By that measure, Gatwick’s northern runway expansion could well be a welfare-enhancing choice.

Marwan Izzeldin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. A second runway at Gatwick airport could improve efficiency and bring down fares – an economist’s view – https://theconversation.com/a-second-runway-at-gatwick-airport-could-improve-efficiency-and-bring-down-fares-an-economists-view-265995

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Klara Widrig, Postdoctoral research fellow, Smithsonian Institution

Aside from being a delight to watch, flight in birds is regarded by many cultures as a symbol of freedom, and a source of inspiration for humans to build our own flying machines. This makes those birds that have given up flight for a land-based way of life seem all the more intriguing.

In our new study of a 56 million-year-old fossil bird, my colleagues and I show that the distant ancestors of ostriches and other large flightless birds once flew great distances.

Many flightless birds belong to Palaeognathae, a taxonomic group containing ostriches, rheas, emus, cassowaries and kiwi, as well as the tinamous of Central and South America.

Unlike their large flightless relatives, tinamous can fly – but not very far. Spending most of their lives on the ground, they tend to fly only if startled by a predator. If you have ever been on a walk and startled a grouse or pheasant, this type of flight, known scientifically as burst flight, will be familiar to you.

Because they are flightless (or can’t fly far), the fact that palaeognaths are found on many different continents – South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand – has been difficult for scientists to explain.

When the theory of plate tectonics became widely accepted in the 1960s, an answer seemed within reach. All of the continents were once united as the supercontinent Pangea, which slowly broke apart during the time of the dinosaurs, starting to split around 200 million years ago. Scientists wondered whether different populations of flightless palaeognaths could have just drifted apart from each other along with the continents they lived on.

However, this once-popular theory has since been discredited for two reasons. One is that the flying tinamous are genetically closer to some flightless palaeognaths than they are to others. This means that ostriches, rheas, emus, cassowaries and kiwi did not share a flightless common ancestor. Instead, in a remarkable case of parallel evolution, they all became flightless separately from each other.

The second reason is that genetic research shows palaeognath lineages started to separate many millions of years after Pangea broke up – far too late for the continental drift theory to be true.

This means palaeognaths had to have made it to South America, Africa,
Australia and New Zealand under their own power. Only able to fly in short bursts, a tinamou doesn’t stand a chance of flying across an ocean – but what about palaeognaths from the distant past? Could the ancestors of today’s palaeognaths have made these long journeys?

The collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC include an almost perfectly preserved sternum, or breastbone, belonging to an ancient palaeognath called Lithornis promiscuus that lived 56 million years ago. It was a fairly large bird, about the size of a grey heron.

Other researchers had determined that the sternum is a key piece of the skeleton for determining the flight style of a bird, so this fossil was our best chance to determine what this ancient bird was capable of.

Using a technique called geometric morphometrics, we compared the shape of the Lithornis sternum to those of over 150 living bird species. Our results show that Lithornis was not a burst flier like today’s tinamous. Instead, its sternum is most similar in shape to birds that fly huge distances, such as egrets and herons. This means means that, unlike their living relatives, Lithornis and other ancient palaeognaths would have been capable world travellers, able to establish new populations on different continents.

Why did these birds become flightless over and over again?

No matter how beautiful or inspiring we think flying is, it is also hard. If a bird species finds itself in a situation where it can get all of its food on the ground and doesn’t need to fly to escape predators, it will probably evolve towards being flightless.

Nowadays, these conditions are only met on islands, with the dodo being perhaps the most famous example. The dodo was a flightless bird that roamed Mauritius until it became extinct in the 1600s.

Dodos had no natural predators until humans arrived in the late 1500s (bringing with them other animals including rats). This meant dodos had not evolved a fear response, and there are records of them happily approaching humans.

Back when Lithornis and its relatives were alive, the world was very different. Just a few million years before, the dinosaurs had gone extinct. With no major predators around, birds were safe on the ground on continents as well as islands. And with a specialised bill tip organ as well as a keen sense of smell, Lithornis was well suited for probing for food in the soil, so it had no need to fly up into the trees to feed.

Therefore, ancient palaeognaths were set on a course towards flightlessness or low flight capacity wherever they went around the world. New mammalian predators evolved slowly, over millions of years, giving these flightless birds plenty of time to evolve new ways to escape and defend themselves.

After these long-distance flying ancestors went extinct, we were left with a puzzling distribution of these birds that could only be explained by the fossil record.

Klara Widrig received funding from the Gates Cambridge Trust.

– ref. The ancestors of ostriches and emus were long-distance fliers – here’s how we worked this out – https://theconversation.com/the-ancestors-of-ostriches-and-emus-were-long-distance-fliers-heres-how-we-worked-this-out-266081