Online repositories of photographs and videos provide insights into the evolution of skilled hindlimb movements in birds.

ABSTRACT: The ability to manipulate objects with limbs has evolved repeatedly among land tetrapods. Several selective forces have been proposed to explain the emergence of forelimb manipulation, however, work has been largely restricted to mammals, which prevents the testing of evolutionary hypotheses in a comprehensive evolutionary framework. In birds, forelimbs have gained the exclusive function of flight, with grasping transferred predominantly to the beak. In some birds, the feet are also used in manipulative tasks and appear to share some features with manual grasping and prehension in mammals, but this has not been systematically investigated. Here we use large online repositories of photographs and videos to quantify foot manipulative skills across a large sample of bird species (>1000 specie

SUBMITTER: Gutierrez-Ibanez C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10427617 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature