Megapodes

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Large ground-dwelling birds of Australasia and nearby islands that lay their eggs in mounds of sand, soil or decaying vegetation and leave them to hatch on their own
2. Stocky, chicken-like birds found across Australasia that bury their eggs in warm heaps and let the heat of the decomposing material incubate them
3. Birds of the family Megapodiidae, which build large mounds to incubate their eggs and whose chicks emerge fully independent without any parental care

Etymology: "Megapodes" is the plural of "megapode", a name for the ground-dwelling birds of the Megapodiidae family, the mound-builders of Australasia and nearby islands. The singular comes from "mega-", Greek for "great" or "large", combined with "-pode", from Greek "pous", meaning "foot". Together they describe a bird with large feet, a reference to the powerful legs these birds use to scrape up leaf litter and soil. The name was not coined for birds in general but for a specific genus, "Megapodius", the scientific Latin name given to the group. The English word was formed from that genus name, so the word belongs to the vocabulary of natural history rather than to everyday speech. The common term for the species of this kind is the "megapode", which English took directly from the scientific Latin.