'Podes' demystified

I was going to just post this as a comment, but it's too good to be hidden away and missed! Heino from the Gardens sent me this explanation of what the 'pod' in megapod refers to. Hope you don't mind me quoting you Heino, and thanks for the explanation! I'm glad I won't miss out on all of your interesting tid-bits just because I'm not in Canberra...

"I reckon megapods have big feet - which is the Greek/Latin meaning. Regarding the "pod" part of the word think of tripod or podiatrist.In ancient Greek "pod" is not a word by itself but is the root for various foot-related words. Incidentally, you may see megapodes, instead of megapods, as the plural. In ancient Greek you'd add "s" to pod to make the singular "foot" but you'd add "es" to pod to make the plural "feet". But in ancient Greek you couldn't end a word in "ds", so the "d" was dropped and the vowel lengthened to give "pous" as the singular. In the English word megapod we use the stem form but in the word octopus we've taken over the actual Greek word for foot. That also explains why some people maintain that the proper plural is octopodes, not octopuses - and certainly not octopi.

Anyway, back to birds. Your megapods dug egg-laying holes, so big feet would be useful as shovels. Various mound-building birds are also megapods. Again, large feet would be very useful in raking up leaf litter etc"