h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

It boggles what's left of my mind, that these birds have such a huge range. From Tuscany to the tip of Africa is a very long way, and they manage to do it.

Hello! Yes cuckoos are amazing migrants. They've tracked Eurasian cuckoos recently as they migrated from Europe to Africa and back... incredible, one of them crossed the Sahara in a single non-stop two-day flight.

These are actually hard to spot, I haven't spotted one yet!

They may be called cuckoos, but they seem plenty smart at getting where they want to go.

Our feathered friends are indeed much more savvy than we give them credit for.

Might flight be in the future for humans as well?

Consider those often big, grounded dinosaurs, which got lighter and eventually took up flight.

Then the rodents got into the act. Basically, bats are flying mice. some squirrels can fly, after a fashion. Some frogs have membranes that they can spread, so as to coast out of the treetops.

Bats are actually close relatives of the primates and were originally classified as primates.

Bats apparently differentiated from arboreal shrews before the tree shrews differentiated into lemurs.

An exception to that rule is the flying foxes, which differentiated from lemurs about the same time as the first monkeys.

I think you mean the flying lemur, or Colugo. That one seems like something intermediate between a primate and a bat. But flying foxes are fruit bats, quite proper bats, no closer to primates than any other bats.

Flying lemurs?

That brings up images of the Wicked Witch of the West and her flying monkeys.

Would you name a flying fox Miles Prower?

Over here, rather Killo Meterprower.

Miles Prower is a friend of Sonic the hedgehog.

I know! But most flying foxes live in countries where they use the metric system.

Anyhoo, point of what I said, bats are among our closest evolutionary relatives, after apes, monkeys and lemurs.

Seems like a rather crowded belfry.

I was just trying to extend the pun of Miles Prower's name, Paulh.

And doing a fine job of it, too.