The kiwi, a six lb bird famously associated with New Zealand, is known for a few things: Being somewhat clumsy? Yes. Sharing its name with a delicious fruit? Certainly. All true, but the kiwi is perhaps most notable for being flightless. Previously, Australia had at least some claim to the beloved bird, as it was believed the emu was its closest relative. Not only is that not the case (it’s most closely related to the extinct Madagascan elephant bird), but researchers from the University of Adelaide have found something even more shocking: Both of these seemingly flightless birds once flew.

“This result was about as unexpected as you could get,” says Mr Kieren Mitchell, PhD candidate with the University of Adelaide’s Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD), who performed the work. “New Zealand and Madagascar were only ever distantly physically joined via Antarctica and Australia, so this result shows the ratites must have dispersed around the world by flight.” Earlier work by professor Alan Cooper in the 1990s was the source of the kiwi-emu connection.

Previously, ratites (a family of large, flightless birds that includes the ostrich, emu, the extinct New Zealand moa and the aforementioned elephant bird) were something of a mystery: If they couldn’t fly, how did they spread across a wide range of territories? It was believed that they all began as flightless birds, somehow forming independently over the past 130 million years or so.

The new DNA study suggests that that’s not the case. Armed with a sizable chunk of elephant bird DNA, Mitchell and his team were able to determine when the ratite species diverged from one another.

“The evidence suggests flying ratite ancestors dispersed around the world right after the dinosaurs went extinct, before the mammals dramatically increased in size and became the dominant group,” says Professor Cooper. “We think the ratites exploited that narrow window of opportunity to become large herbivores, but once mammals also got large, about 50 million years ago, no other bird could try that idea again unless they were on a mammal free island – like the Dodo.”

The DNA connection explains a lot of things – why tracking their evolution was so difficult (though related, they appeared to converge on similar physiology independently), and why the kiwi is so small (with the then-living moa, there was no room for another large herbivore). According to the researchers, fossils of not-too-distant kiwi ancestors indicate that the kiwi likely had the power of flight in somewhat recent history.

“It’s great to finally set the record straight, as New Zealanders were shocked and dismayed to find that the national bird appeared to be an Australian immigrant,” says Professor Cooper. “I can only apologize it has taken so long!”