Talk:Ratite

message: Quote:
 - "Ratite chicks tend to be more omnivorous at 4 metres (13 ft)."
What is this meant to mean? I suspect a block of text has been removed here, leaving 2 sentence fragments. Someone could check the history for an errant deletion? Liam Proven (talk) 13:28, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Omnivory section - over-zealous editing? 

message: The kiwi is described as "stroppy." I can't seem to find a meaning for this word. Is it from New Zealand English? Wachholder0 15:21, 20 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Stroppy" 

message: I suggest changing the first sentence to identify ratites as an "order" rather than a "diverse group."  Ratites are an order of birds, and the article does not even suggest this fact until the discussion of its evolution. r3 13:28, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: This is actually a good thing. E.g. the fossil record of ostriches strongly suggests against ratite monphyly. To say that "cladistic" evidence (cladistics is a method of interpretation, not of gathering data) for any hypothesis is "strong" is seriously flawed. At present, nobody would really admit to have a solution for the problem; bad choice of outgroups and bad methodology in general have hampered taxonomic research in this group perhaps more than in any other bird clade, and few characters can really considered synapomorphic (as opposed to paleognaths, which by now are a bit better grounded in evidence). Olson, no lightweight exactly, in 1985 argued rather strongly for a closer relationship between ostriches and herons, if one can imagine that (and if, really only because herons have become also quite difficult to place more recently). "Ratites" ATM seem to be mono-or polyphyletic, with the case for the former perhaps a bit stronger, but even paraphyly cannot be wholly discounted. Dysmorodrepanis 20:35, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Wow, I got ill, spent a year in the hospital and came back and the controversy is still unsolved. I put in a statement synopsisizing (sic) the controversy with three references supporting both ends. Let me know what you think. Or even better if it can be improved on. speednat (talk) 02:13, 14 June 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Identify Ratites as an order 

message: Is there any actual source that describes Chocobo as ratites? Or is the the assumption of fans based on the fact that it's a flightless bird? If the later, how do you know it's not a Mihirung or something? As this article illustrates, there are many, many forms of flightless birds besides ratites.Dinoguy2 15:52, 4 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Fictional ratities 

message: "Extinct by 1500 due to hunting by human settlers, who arrived around 1000, although at least one species may have survived past this date and maybe was seen by early European settlers."
"At least" can't go with "may" like this. What's the currently accepted theory - were they all dead or weren't they? Aaadddaaammm 21:55, 7 February 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Of course it can (even the last "maybe" can, though it's probably factually wrong). There is uncertainty on whether there was moa survival until European contact, and there is uncertainty concerning the number of species that would have remained at that time. Current mainstream opinion answers with "probably not, but barely so, though the possibility cannot be discounted" and "one". There simply is no accepted theory, only a working hypothesis supported by the majority of researchers. The problem is that the most likely candidate for late survival would not have been encountered by Europeans in any case until later, because it would have survived only because of the remoteness of its habitat. So we're dealing with a hypothesis at present not supportable by the available evidence because that simply does not touch it; the point is that even if the Lesser Megalapteryx survived until after European contact, its eventual demise would most likely not have been witnessed by Europeans, and hardly so by Maori either (The "moa" legends are just that: legends that quite obviously do not refer to a critter encountered within living memory). Eyewitness reports are discountable due to (usually) the place and habitat being wrong. What would be needed is a post-contact radiocarbon date; no such material has been found to date. We do not even know where the last population of the Lesser Megalapterxy lived exactly (i.e., where to search caves for remains). Dysmorodrepanis 13:19, 8 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Phrasing 

message: Can the different Ratites (Ostrich, Emu, Rhea) be kept together in the same enclosure, or free range?. - 01:28, 25 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Farming 

message: I'm having a lot of trouble understanding the systematics section.  First, it was only from the discussion that I figured out that the ratites might not be monophyletic.
In view of that, can we say anything on speculations about closer relatives, such as the herons mentioned above?
"DNA analysis appears to show that the ratites diverged from one another too recently to share a common Gondwanian ancestor"  Recent divergence means recent common ancestry, so it's consistent with a common Gondwanan ancestor.  Should that say "diverged from each other too long ago"?
"However, recent analysis of genetic variation between the ratites conflicts with this [Gondwanan monophyly]: DNA analysis […] suggests that the kiwi are more closely related to the cassowaries than the moa."  I don't see what which ratite is closest to the kiwi has to do with the monophyly of the whole group.  And I think the sentence would be better as "the kiwi are more closely related to the cassowaries than the moa is", but I didn't change it because it might mean "the kiwi are more closely related to the cassowaries than to the moa".
I think more needs to be said about Palaeotis, at least that it could fly.
"Research continues, but at present the ratites are perhaps the one group of modern birds for which no robust theory of their evolution and paleobiogeography exists."  Does that mean that perhaps no robust theory exists, or definitely no robust theory exists and perhaps the ratites are the only group without such a theory?  I'd have trouble believing the latter—the AOU says incertae sedis about several groups.
"Struthioniformes sensu stricto": Can't we call this "Struthionidae" independent of all controversies?  —JerryFriedman 04:37, 23 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Systematics 

message: In the intro section it says
:Most parts of the former Gondwana have ratites, or have had until the fairly recent past. Their closest living relatives are the tinamous of South America
What does it mean? I understand that there are living Ratite's so presumably it means the closed living relatives of some particular prehistoric ratite species? Billlion (talk) 11:22, 23 November 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: What does this mean

message: Under "behavior - reproduction" there is this sentence, "Ostriches are the only ratites where they female incubates, and with them, they share the duties, with the males incubating at night. Kiwis stand out as the exception with a monogamous relationship."
It makes no sense to me at all and I would correct it except I have no clue what to correct it to.
Can an expert or someone with the proper knowledge please correct this sentence and provide a citation?
Thanks. 98.247.77.63 (talk) 13:13, 26 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: fixed, based on reference in  Great_spotted_kiwi#Breeding_and_nesting. David Woodward (talk) 10:28, 7 July 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  This sentence makes no sense at all! 

message: supposedly, I have read, from people here, that struthioniformes, rheiformes, apterygiformes, casuariiformes, Lithornithiformes, aepyornithformes, dinornithiformes, are all seperate orders, wheras in the past some of these were below struthioniformes.  I can't find a source for this to verify.  can someone point me in the right direction speednat (talk) 00:08, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There is little controversy in order-level ratite classification, as far as I know. The various ratite groups certainly are quite distinct, and the strong support for the rhea-tinamou clade fixes things. Read through all the current literature on ratites, and you'll see a multiple-order classification. Even popular encyclopedias like those on animals by National Geographic, Firefly, and the universities of California and Melbourne use a five-order classification. Why is Wikipedia so far behind? innotata Talk Contribs 00:05, 6 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Struthioniformes and the other ratites being seperated 

message: New research has the extinct moa species as being most closely related to the tinamous rather than to other ratites. Big implications for this article. First the NZ Herald version, then the paper it derives from:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/science/news/article.cfm?c_id=82&objectid=10623539
http://sysbio.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/59/1/90
Kahuroa (talk) 04:23, 3 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Moa, tinamous, implications for Ratites

message: Surely that's true of any group of animals, such as, say, the reptiles, and is not notable. Perhaps "many of them recently extinct"? 81.131.32.148 (talk) 09:36, 10 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Most of them now extinct" 

message: It makes a lot of sense to have separate lists of footnotes and references when one has numerous citations to different pages of the same source(s). Then one can substitute a long list of notes with short entries and a short list of references with long entries for a long list of references with long entries.
However, it really does not make sense to have separate lists of notes and references when there is only a single entry for each source in the notes list. Then the notes list is simply redundant, and just makes it harder for the reader to go from the point in the text where the citation occurs to the reference entry. WolfmanSF (talk) 03:36, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Notes and references 

message: In the Evolution section:
"The longstanding story of ratite evolution was that they share a common flightless ancestor that lived in Gondwana, whose descendants were isolated from each other by continental drift,..."
This should say plate tectonics, as it does later in the section. Continental drift was an early 20th Century theory that the continents drifted around on the ocean. It's not the same as plate tectonics, which is the currently accepted theory. 24.59.58.64 (talk) 02:12, 25 March 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Continental drift" 

message: In the article ratites are described as a polyphyletic group which excludes the tinamous, but I would argue that due to genetic evidence of their place in the clade, it makes more sense to describe ratites as a mostly flightless monophyletic group including the tinamous as the flighted exception which illustrate that flightlessness evolved convergently within the clade multiple times. 204.58.180.206 (talk) 19:48, 10 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Monophyletic vs Polyphyletic and the Place of Tinamous