A new paper, co-authored by Dakota McCoy, a graduate student working in the lab of George Putnam Professor of Biology David Haig, suggests that, after using tools, crows were more optimistic.

Based on an analysis of the genomes of more than a dozen flightless birds, including an extinct moa, a team led by Harvard researchers found that while different species show wide variety in the protein-coding portions of their genomes, they appear to turn to the same regulatory pathways when evolving flight loss.