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About 1,000 years ago , a little lost Ibis got stuck in a cave on the Hawaiian island of Lanai . When researcher discovered his skeleton in 1995 , his feather served as the first example of the how these extinct Hawaiian ibis were adorned .
The nearly thoroughgoing frame of the small bird wasdiscovered in a lava tube(a case of cave created by lava current ) . Because of the extra - dry surroundings in the cave , the fossilized feathers were preserved well enough to make out microscopic structures .
This is the skull ofApteribis sp.
Thewing bonesand dresser bones revealedthe bird was flightlesslike New ibis . However , these bones looked so unlike from those of other ibises that researchers needed feathers and desoxyribonucleic acid analyses to sustain the species ' place on the ibis household tree .
" We know it was an ibis . It was a flightless ibis . The frame that was witness with the feathers dissent so much from the mainland ibis , that its kinship to the other ibis was indeterminable , " bailiwick researcher Carla Dove , of the Smithsonian ’s National Museum of Natural History , told LiveScience .
Fossil plume
This scanning electron photomicrograph shows the prongs on the downy barbules of anApteribis sp. feather.
The research worker compared the fossilized feathers with feathers from 11 modernistic ibis . They focused on the feathers ' barbules , microscopical structures within the downy part of a feathering near the radix . These barbules are distinctive of certain specie of ibis .
Their analyses suggested the bird was a phallus of the genusApteribis , a grouping of flightless ibises from the Hawaiian Islands discovered in 1976 and whose extremity are related to the American bloodless ibis and the ruddy ibis . It is one of dozens of bird species known to havegone extinct after humans arrivedon the Islands .
Though the bird seem to have been flightless , the researchers discovered they were fit out with pocket-sized structure call hooklets , which hold a feather ’s wispy strands together , giving them structure in the expression of wind or water stresses . These hooklets are limited adjustment for flight .
This is a detail of the top of the skull showing feathers adhering to the cranium ofApteribis sp.
colourise in ibises
Because thefeathers were so well preserved , the investigator were even able to see some of the feather colors . One exercise set of feathers were dark in color , perchance dark chocolate-brown or black , while another set was lighter , perhaps beige or ivory . The researchers evoke the out specie may have looked like a unseasoned American white ibis .
" The pigmentation in the dodo plume showed that the plumage was in all probability most similar to that of juvenile snowy ibises , which are browned with a whitish stomach , rather than adults , which are all white , " subject investigator Storrs Olson , also at the National Museum of Natural History , tell LiveScience in an email .
" The Hawaiian fowl ( also have a go at it from Molokai and Maui but not the other island of Hawaii ) were shorter legged and had small wing compared with white ibis and were in all likelihood almost entirely woods dwellers that feed in on snails and other invertebrates in the forest litter . "
The study was published in the September 2011 result of the Journal of Paleontology .
