“normal” beaks (examples shown of a petrel and a gull) and a bird with a tactile bill-tip organ (a tinamou, close relative of ostriches and emus and which has an ancestral bill-tip organ ...

Under these drastically changing conditions, the struggle to survive favored the larger birds with deep, strong beaks for opening the hard seeds. Smaller finches with less-powerful beaks perished.

Three years ago, Deakin University researchers published a paper showing examples ... focusing on Australian birds. We identified decreasing body sizes and increasing beak sizes over time, in ...