12 Surprising Flightless Birds. We all know ostriches, emus, and penguins can't fly. But these flightless ducks, sea birds, and parrots will make you do a double-take.

A species of huge, flightless bird that once inhabited New Zealand disappeared around 600 years ago, shortly after human ...

It’s official: There really was a giant, flightless bird with a head the size of a horse’s wandering about in the winter twilight of the high Arctic some 53 million years ago. Skip to main content .

Australia's giant carnivorous kangaroos, 7-metre-long lizards, marsupial lions and enormous flightless birds all died off between 45,000 and 55,000 … Close. Advertisement.

Big, flightless birds like the ostrich, the emu and the rhea are scattered around the Southern Hemisphere because their ancestors once flew around the world, a new study suggests. That's a ...

No other animal is as inexorably linked with extinction as the dodo, an odd-looking flightless bird that lived on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean until the late 17th century.

The largest birds ever recorded by science — elephant birds — were nocturnal and possibly blind, ... The elephant bird was a 10-foot-tall flightless bird that went extinct 500 to 1,000 years ago.

The ancestors of ostriches and other flightless birds once flew, a new study says. They apparently grounded themselves in earnest, though, after dinosaurs were wiped out.

Those birds, the authors say, likely flew between the continents, with some staying and becoming the large, flightless species we know today. A keeper holds in his hands two Kiwi chicks at the zoo ...

But catastrophe struck about 136,000 years ago, when a major flood swept the atoll — and the flightless birds — beneath the waters of the Indian Ocean, leading to the birds' extinction.