Roadrunner
A Greater Roadrunner with a lizard
Roadrunners rely on quick reflexes and surprise to catch their prey. Running is mainly for travel.
A Greater Roadrunner with a lizard
Roadrunners rely on quick reflexes and surprise to catch their prey. Running is mainly for travel.
■ In real life, a coyote is much faster than a roadrunner (even without any rockets or other accessories used by the cartoon coyote), but a roadrunner is faster than most humans. If the competitors shown here ran a 100-meter sprint, the ostrich would easily take first place, in under five seconds (with a top speed of about 60 miles per hour, and sustained 45). The coyote would be close behind, in under six seconds (over 40 miles per hour). The roadrunner and Usain Bolt would take about twice as long. A roadrunner’s top speed is said to be about 20 miles per hour, which would get it across the finish line in just over eleven seconds. Usain Bolt’s 100-meter record is under 9.6 seconds, or about 23 miles per hour. The average human runner finishes in fifteen seconds (under 15 miles per hour). So an elite human sprinter would beat the roadrunner to the line—but most of us would not.
A hypothetical race involving a roadrunner and four competitors
■ For more than a century, the link between birds and dinosaurs was debated, but recent discoveries of many dinosaur fossils with feathers and other birdlike features, and a better understanding of the evolution of feathers (see this page), has settled the debate. Modern birds are the descendants of dinosaurs. Anchiornis, shown here, was one of the “proto-birds” from about 160 million years ago; it was smaller than a roadrunner. It probably couldn’t fly. Its feathers were loose and shaggy without interlocking barbules (the third stage in the evolution of feathers), and might have been useful for gliding, but were probably mainly for insulation and display. Many other feathered dinosaurs and true birds evolved in the next 100 million years after Anchiornis, but almost all went extinct after the meteor impact 66 million years ago.
The feathered dinosaur known as Anchiornis
■ At the time of the meteor impact that ended the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago, there was a great variety of birds on earth, including many species that lived in trees and were fully capable of flight. That event killed most of the large trees on earth as well as all of the non-avian dinosaurs, and ferns became the dominant plants for thousands of years afterward. Only about 25 percent of all species of plants and animals survived the catastrophic global changes, and among birds only a few small ground-dwelling species survived. These included one species that gave rise to the modern tinamou/ostrich group, another species that gave rise to the modern duck/chicken group, and a third species (perhaps pigeon-like or grebe-like or maybe even roadrunner-like) that gave rise to all other modern birds.
Greater Roadrunner running