I am glad you enjoyed learning about it! I’ve seen tons of them from cooking chicken or turkey, but never paid it any mind as it was just another bone. We don’t have this bone, so of course it doesn’t really mean anything to us. It’s critical to the bird though, and it’s an amazing simple but effective piece of equipment!

Bird bones are really neat when you look at them from an evolutionary perspective. It’s readily apparent how as they transitioned from being terrestrial dinosaurs to modern birds how the bones changed along with them. Many bones got consolidated into simpler structures while others grow to withstand all the forces flight put on the body. While the thinking now is that archaeopteryx could indeed fly, they were still spending most of their time on land, while many modern birds can fly hundreds of miles.