Megapode

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A ground-dwelling bird of the Megapodiidae family that lays its eggs in mounds of sand, soil or decaying vegetation and leaves them to hatch on their own
2. Any of several chicken-like birds found in Australasia that incubate their eggs in large heaps of warm debris rather than sitting on them
3. A fowl-like bird of the Pacific region whose chicks emerge fully independent after being hatched in buried mounds kept warm by the sun or rotting plants

Etymology: Megapode is the name for a group of ground-dwelling birds, including the mallee fowl and the brush turkeys of Australasia, that build huge mounds of soil, sand and rotting vegetation and let the heat of decomposition incubate their eggs rather than sitting on them. The name is a modern coinage: it combines the Greek prefix "mega-", meaning "great" or "large", with "-pode", from the Greek "pous" meaning "foot". The birds' feet are unusually large and strong, which is why the foot, rather than the egg or the nest, supplied the second half of the name. The first half points to the same striking feature as the second. The word was built after scientific Latin "Megapodius", the genus name given to these birds, so the naming followed the usual pattern of natural history, where Greek and Latin roots were assembled to describe a newly catalogued animal. Ancient Greek speakers had no word of this shape, because the birds were unknown to them as a group.