Washington [US]: Diving birds like penguins, puffins and cormorants may be more prone to extinction than non-birds">diving birds, according to a new study by the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. The authors suggest this is because they are highly specialised and therefore less able to adapt to changing environments than other birds.
The ability to dive is quite rare in birds, with less than a third of the 727 species of water bird using this way of hunting for food. Evolutionary scientists Joshua Tyler and Dr Jane Younger studied of the evolution of diving in modern waterbirds to investigate how diving impacted: the physical characteristics of the birds (morphology); how the species evolved to increase diversity (rate of speciation); and how prone the species were to extinction.
