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This is Scientific American 60-second science. I'm Annie Sneed.

The beak shapes of different species of Galapagos finches played an important part in Darwin's conception of natural selection.

In our field, there is this presumption that the beak shape in birds is quite correlated with what they eat and how they eat it, so they're feeding ecologists.

Guillermo Navallon, a PhD student at the University of Bristol in the UK, and a co-author

of a new study that found that the connection between beak shape and diet isn't as tight as we

thought. The studies in the journal Evolution. Navallon and his

colleagues analyzed photographs of museum specimens of 176 bird skulls. They looked at beak shape and size

in almost all of the orders of modern birds and compared the beaks with other factors, such as

feeding behavior and body size. And they found that the

beak shape was indeed somewhat tied to what birds feed on and how they eat. But the relationship

was actually surprisingly weak, accounting for just 12% of beak shape variation.

The explanation that we struck from there is that the beak are basically surrogate hands in the birds.

So they are used for a plethora of different functions beyond feeding ecology.

So like the beak in general in birds have many other functions so they use it for displaying nest

construction singing, term regulation in some cases like toucans or like hornbills

so there is like a lot of factors that probably have intervened in the evolution of be able.

Thanks for listening. For Scientific American 60 Second Science, I'm Annie Sneed.

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