A massive but surprisingly delicate ‘elephant bird’ once roamed Madagascar, according to a new study which gives the title of greatest bird of all time to a new species.
The winner? Aepyornis maximuswhich lived over 1,200 years ago on the island of Madagascar and wielded a raptor-like beak and impressive talons, though it probably ate mainly plants and occasionally a small lizard.
The largest elephant birds were about 9 feet tall and weighed up to 2200 pounds, about as much as a toy car or a rhinoceros, depending on the size of their eggs. They would have dominated all other humans and animals on the island, including the first Polynesians who arrived around 2,000 years ago.
Winner by a beak
Previously, the title of the greatest bird of all time belonged to another species of elephant bird, Vorombe Titanwho won the honor with a study 2018 who analyzed elephant bones from birds around the world.
The new study published in 2023, which relied on DNA extracted from ancient eggshells of elephant birds, concludes that the V.titan And A. maximus the material differed so little that it formed at best a single species related to modern ostriches, emus and kiwis. Additionally, the researchers suggested that V.titan may in fact be the female members of A. maximusin a similar arrangement to kiwi populations, where females are up to twice as large as males.
The researchers spent several years collecting 950 seashells from island sites, some of which were first identified from satellite images, in an effort to complete the sparse skeletal record of the birds. The wet conditions had worn down the DNA from the bones and left little room for the researchers to work.
In the end, they chose to streamline the elephant bird family, which had once grown to 16 species, down to just three.
“These findings are a significant step forward in understanding the complex history of these enigmatic birds,” says Alicia Grealy, who conducted the research for her doctoral dissertation at Curtin University in Australia. in a press release. “There is surprisingly much to discover from the eggshell.”
Puzzle
She teamed up with Gifford Miller, a professor of geological sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who has long studied eggshell remains in Australia and around the world. They began egg collection in the dry southern parts of the island, then moved to the swampy and forested north, where they found an unexpected new genetic line of A.Maximus. The shells contained mitochondrial DNA sealed so tightly that the team estimated it could have survived intact for 10,000 years.
That’s not to say it was entirely intact: once scientists had extracted the genetic information, they still had to piece together the disparate segments like a “genetic puzzle” to arrive at the genomes to study.
As is the case with other megafauna, elephant birds have disappeared as Homo sapiens have proliferated across the world, and no one knows exactly why.
“What did early humans do that drives the extinction of large animals, in particular?” Miller said in a press release. “It’s a debate that’s been going on for my entire life.”