In 1812, the English ship Providence visited New Zealand. Its captain collected some specimens of its wildlife and brought them back to London. Among them was the skin of a bird that puzzled the British Museum’s experts.

The bird was about the size of a hen. It had no sign of wings or a tail. It seemed to be covered with a shaggy coat of hair, rather than feathers. Its four-toed feet were huge, and so was its beak, which had nostrils placed right at the tip. It looked more like a hobgoblin than a bird.

One of the scientists gave it a Latin name: Apteryx australis, which meant “southern bird without wings.” Another thought it might be related to the penguins. A third man suggested it was a dwarf ostrich.

In time the truth became clear. The hairy, long-billed bird belonged to a special group called Ratites, which had stopped flying 100 million years ago, or possibly never did fly at all. This wingless furry bird, which the Maoris called the kiwi, was in fact linked to the emu and the cassowary.

All these birds have special features setting them apart from other birds. Their feathers are stringy, looking more like fur or hair. They lay huge eggs and their legs are very strong. The kick of an ostrich, for instance, can kill a man.

The kiwi is the only living bird that has a sense of smell and it can be heard making loud sniffing noises as it pokes its bill along the ground. It has sharp powerful claws, which it uses to defend itself.

It is a comical-looking creature to begin with. What makes it more amusing is its occasional habit of sleeping in a “three-legged” position, resting the tip of its bill on the ground.

Perhaps the most unbelievable thing about the kiwi is the size of its eggs. Though not bigger than a hen, a kiwi lays eggs as big as an ostrich’s. Kiwi eggs as large as 5 by 2¾ inches have been laid, weighing a third as much as the bird that laid them!

These flightless birds are living fossils that tell us a great deal about evolution. We do not know for sure whether they have been changed by time. Very little fossil information is available about them. Even the extinct forms died out only a few centuries ago.

How can we call them living fossils, then, if we do not have the fossils of their ancestors?

Scientists think they are because they look much more primitive than the flying birds. They appear to go back to the time when the first birds were evolving.

That was in the Jurassic period, when dinosaurs walked the earth. The oldest known fossil bird is called Archaeopteryx, a name that means “ancient bird.” Perhaps some Jurassic or Cretaceous family of small dinosaurs evolved into the ancestors of the kiwi and the ostrich. Many dinosaurs walked on their hind legs and were only a few feet tall.

The oldest ostrich fossils discovered so far are only about a million years old. So it is only a guess that the flightless two-legged birds are members of an ancient line of evolution, separate from the main stock of flying birds.