How Did Flightless Birds Reach Lanzarote?

A clearer idea of the timescale of Lanzarote’s existence provides understanding to one of the island’s natural mysteries.

When scientists discovered fossils of the eggs of flightless birds on Lanzarote 60 years ago, they were mystified. How could they have got to islands that have never been connected to the mainland of Africa?

To understand, it’s worth considering the timescale of Lanzarote’s existence. Lanzarote emerged from the sea roughly 15 million years ago, and there are just over 30 million seconds in a year, meaning that if the history of the island was measured over the period of a year, each year would last for approximately two seconds.

On that timescale, it would be around 10.20 pm on December 31st before the first humans settled on the island. The eruptions of Timanfaya would occur at ten minutes to midnight on the same day while the entire tourist era of Lanzarote would take place in the last two minutes of the 31st December.

Plenty of other things happened during that immense timescale, of course. The Famara cliffs rose around April time, initially immense, before collapsing and being eroded down to their current height of under 700 metres. Five other Canary Islands rose from OSTRICH MYSTERY the oceans to join the landmass formed by Lanzarote and Fuerteventura, while other islands sank beneath the waves again.

And life, almost certainly, arrived on the island early. Birds were already well-evolved in the Miocene era when Lanzarote was formed, and it would not have been long before strays brought here by bad weather established local breeding colonies.

Fossils show that the Canaries were also home to giant tortoises and lizards, while 20-metre megalodon sharks cruised the oceans around the isles.

But other fossils discovered on Lanzarote have posed a genuine mystery: how did flightless birds reach Lanzarote?

The fossils are the eggs of a ratite, an ostrich-like bird, found in zones near Famara beach and dated back to between 5.2 and 6 million years ago (late summer in our year-long timescale).

Modern ratites include kiwis, ostriches and emus, but what they all share is flightlessness. There is no chance whatsoever that a ratite could have got to Lanzarote by air.

There is also absolutely no indication of any kind of land bridge ever existing between Lanzarote and the African mainland.

The most popular theory for the presence of the ratites on Lanzarote is the “rafting” theory. This suggests that the ratites may have existed on large floating rafts of vegetation that were swept out to sea and reached the Canaries.

These rafts are still seen frequently in rivers in the tropics, and have been observed to carry lizards to a place where they previously did not exist. In fact, rafting is the likely reason for the presence of smaller creatures such as lizards and shrews, on the Canaries.

The ratites were larger, but the possibility of a rafting event is not impossible, especially given the huge timescales we are taking about. All that would have to happen is that ratites reached the islands and bred.

If we consider that modern humans, Homo sapiens, arrived in the world at around Christmas Day on our year-long Lanzarote timescale, we once again get an idea of how much time these islands have existed and what could have happened in that time.