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After more than a century of contradictory evidence, Anglo-French animosity and a new HG Wells involving the killing of most birds, scientists said Wednesday, Sept. 26 that they finally solved the riddle of the world's largest bird.
For 60 million years, the colossal elephant bird – Aepyornis maximus – traveled the savannah and tropical forests of Madagascar until its disappearance about 1000 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 released 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 adult giraffe.
"They would have dominated people," said James Hansford, lead author of the Zoological Society of London. AFP.
"They certainly could not fly because they could not bear their weight."
In the study, Posted in the newspaper Royal Society Open ScienceHansford has examined elephant bird bones found around the world, incorporating their dimensions into a machine-learned algorithm to create an expected animal size distribution.
Until now, the largest elephant bird was described in 1894 by British scientist C W Andrews as 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.
Hansford said his research 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.
An illustration of the elephant bird, which is probably the largest known known bird. Image courtesy: Jaime Chirinos / Pinterest
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 boundaries of what we now understand about the size of birds," said Hansford, 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 on auction, and he appears in the work of Wells in 1895 "Aepyornis Island "alongside a pugnacious mercenary named Butcher who ends up living with – and ends up killing – one of the creatures.
Despite one of the longest lifetimes of any animal in Madagascar – whose isolation from the rest of Africa has led to the development of several entirely 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 megafauna in Madagascar, including the baby elephant," he said. Hansford.
Far from being an old curiosity, Hansford thinks that the bird-elephant might have vital clues about how to handle Madagascar's future ecosystem even though it's been extinct for 1,000 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."
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