Megapode birds, such as the brush turkey, bury their eggs in soil as crocodilians do rather than brooding them in a nest like other birds
How could you determine whether this mode of incubation is a retained ancestral trait or a derived condition that happens to have reverted to the crocodilian mode?
Megapodes are members of the order Galliformes, which includes chickens, pheasants, quail, and grouse among others (see Table 17?1). The Galliformes is a derived clade within the Neornithes, and the hypothesis that megapodes alone retained the ancestral mode of incubation while all of the lineages that lie between coelurosaurs and megapodes lost that trait is not plausible. The megapode method of incubation is best regarded as a derived character.
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Fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word(s).
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