Evolution can fall well short of perfection. Claire Ainsworth and Michael Le Page assess where life has gone spectacularly wrong
THE ascent of Mount Everest's 8848 metres without bottled oxygen in 1978 suggests that human lungs are pretty impressive organs. But that achievement pales in comparison with the feat of the griffon vulture that set the record for the highest recorded bird flight in 1975 when it was sucked into the engine of a plane flying at 11,264 metres.
Birds can fly so high partly because of the way their lungs work. Air flows through bird lungs in one direction only, pumped through by interlinked air sacs on either side. This gives them numerous advantages over lungs like our own. In mammals' two-way lungs, not as much fresh air reaches the deepest parts of the lungs, and incoming air is diluted by the oxygen-poor air that remains after ...
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