Crossword-Solution: RATITAE 7 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 7

The Ratitae as such are absolutely worthless since they are a most heterogeneous assembly, and there are untold groups, of the artificiality of which many a zoo-geographer had not the slightest suspicion when he took his statistical material, the genera and families, from some systematic catalogues or similar lists.

First Huxley delivered an address; some of the clergy present denounced any concessions as impossible; others declared that they had long ago accepted the teachings of geology; whereupon a candid friend inquired, "Then why don't you say so from your pulpits?" (See "Collected Essays" 3 119.)] In scientific work the main thing just now about which I am engaged is a revision of the Dinosauria, with an eye to the "Descendenz Theorie." The road from Reptiles to Birds is by way of Dinosauria to the Ratitae.

Such a pygostyle is absent in _Archaeopteryx, Hesperornis, Tinami_ and _Ratitae_, but it occurs individually in old specimens of the ostrich and the kiwi.

This primitive condition occurs only in the Odontornithes (q.v.), Ratitae and Tinami; in all others this notch becomes converted into a _foramen ischiadicum_, through which pass the big stems of the ischiadic nerves and most of the blood-vessels of the hind-limb.

The only really aberrant modifications of the wing-muscles are found in the Ratitae, where they are, however, all easily explained by reduction, and in the penguins, where the wings are greatly specialized into blades for rowing with screw-like motions.