this just in from one of my corespondents on the West Coast……

was news to me!

soothing gentle rain this afternoon here in River City =)

[ https://theweek.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=533a8449522e198f5a133e200&id=bc321e7d9e&e=f82734e4ee | Scientists discover formerly extinct bird species made a comeback ]

A previously extinct species of bird made a miraculous return from the dead, scientists write in a new study published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society . The white-throated rail previously inhabited the Aldabra Atoll in the Indian Ocean, but when the island disappeared below the sea about 136,000 years ago, the bird died out, CNN reports. Scientists digging around found fossils from before and after the island slipped under the sea, and discovered the bird reappeared several thousand years later after sea levels declined; it still inhabits the island today. Scientists call this phenomenon of a species repeatedly evolving from the same ancestor “iterative evolution,” and this marks one of the “most significant” instances of it occurring in a bird species, CNN says. In both cases, the white-throated rail colonized the island and evolved to be flightless due to a lack of competing predators. [ [ https://theweek.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=533a8449522e198f5a133e200&id=bbd6c8925a&e=f82734e4ee | CNN ] ]