End decades of doubt, the biggest conflict between birds

Paris (AFP) – After more than a century of contradictory evidence, Anglo-French animosity and a HG Wells news involving the killing of most poultry, scientists said on Wednesday that they finally solved the riddle of the largest bird in the world.

For 60 million years, the colossal elephant elephant Aepyornis maximus pursued the savannah and rainforest forests of Madagascar until its demise about 1,000 years ago.

In the 19th century, a new breed of flamboyant European zoologist obsessed the creature, looting skeletons and fossilized eggs to prove that they had discovered the largest bird on Earth.

But a study published Wednesday by British scientists suggests that a species of elephant bird was even larger than previously thought, with a specimen weighing about 860 kilograms, about the same as an adult giraffe.

"They would have dominated people," said AFP James Hansford, senior author of the Zoological Society of London. "They certainly could not fly because they could not bear their weight."

In the study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, Hanson examined the elephant bird bones found around the world, integrating their dimensions into a machine-learned algorithm to create a distribution of expected animal sizes.

Until now, the British scientist C.W. Andrews described the largest elephant bird as being Aepyornis titan, a larger species of Aepyornis maximus.

But a French rival of Andrews rejected the discovery of titan as an outsize specimen specimen, and the debate remained stuck for decades.

Hanson stated that his research had proved that titan was a different species. But he also found that his bones were so different from other specimens of elephant birds that titan was actually an entirely separate genus.

Named Titan de Vorombe – Malagasy for "Big Bird" – the creature would have reached at least three meters (10 feet) in height and weighed on average 650 kilos, making it the largest kind of bird ever discovered.

"To the extreme extent, we found a bone that really pushed the limits of what we now understand about the size of birds," said Hanson, referring to the 860-kilogram sample.

"And there were some who led to that, so it's not an exception – there was a range of extraordinarily large masses."

– Off, but not forgotten –

Cousin close to the New Zealand moas, now extinct, the elephant bird belonged to the same family of animals unable to fly which today includes the kiwi, the & Zélande,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,, emu and ostrich.

His petrified eggs are still highly prized at auctions, and he appears in Wells' "Aepyornis Island" artwork in 1895 alongside a pugnacious mercenary named Butcher who ends up living with – and ends up kill – one of the creatures.

Despite one of the longest animal lives in Madagascar – whose isolation from the rest of Africa has led to the development of several completely unique species – the elephant bird died out after the arrival of a new wave of human settlers about a millennium ago.

"You are starting to see large amounts of agricultural settlements and habitat changes with burning forests … that seems to have led to the extinction of all Madagascar's megafauna, including the baby elephant," he said. Hanson.

Far from being an old curiosity, Hanson believes that the elephant bird could have vital clues about how to handle Madagascar's future ecosystem even though it's been extinct for 1,000 years. years.

Elephant birds "probably played the most important role in the maintenance and development of Madagascar's natural landscapes before humans went there," he said.

"We need to understand the role of these animals in these landscapes to start regenerating and conserving what we have left."

/ mh / dl