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 big shape in birds is quite correlated with what they eat and how they eat it so they're feeding ecologists.

Giamo Navalon, 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 analyze 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-shaped variation.

The explanation that we strike from there is that the big are basically surrogate hands in birds so they are used for

plethora of different functions beyond feeding ecology. So like the big in general in birds have many other

functions so they use it or display in this construction, singing, turmoil regulation in some cases like Tukans or like hornbills.

So there is like a lot of factors that probably have intervened in the evolution of baking birds.

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