Q. What is ‘Aldabra rail’, recently seen in the news?
Answer:
Flightless bird
Notes: The flightless Aldabra rail, scientifically known as Dryolimnas cuvieri aldabranus, was thought extinct 130,000 years ago but reappeared through iterative evolution. Residing on a coral atoll off Africa's southeast coast, it resembles a chicken with a gray back, red head, and white throat. A subspecies of the white-throated rail, it's the only flightless bird in the Indian Ocean. The Aldabra rail evolved twice, losing its ability to fly, a phenomenon explored in a 2019 Zoological Journal study on the atoll's fossil record. Iterative evolution involves the repeated emergence of traits from the same ancestral lineage at different times.