Bye bye birdie

Continuing with a sort of "endangered species"-theme, I thought I'd write a few lines about a truly magnificent species that another species (*harr harr* Homo sapiens) hunted away from existing to extinction - the Giant Moa (Dinornis). I may be late but I'd never heard about it until today when I red that some researchers had managed to recover DNA from the 2500 year old feathers of this bird. They were able to connect four known Moa species to the DNA samples and thus, were able to draw some conclusions over how these four species looked like. And even better, by comparing the Moa feathers to the still-alive-and-well red crowned parakeet's feathers (but feathers of the same age as the Moa feathers) they could conclude that the colours had not faded or changed.

Reconstructed Giant Moa on some New Zeeland museum.
Image taken from http://www.fotothing.com/photos/9e8/9e818de8b2c96bbd935711688b484789_31c.jpg

Anyway, I wanted to read more about the Giant Moa so with a single google step I learned that this could have been the largest bird that ever lived, reaching up to 2.5 m and weighing 230-240 kg! That's one big chicken McNugget. They seemed to live a grazing lifestyle on New Zeeland until the arrival of the Maori and later, colonists who wanted to eat it, and also due to the ever growing agricultural landscapes destroing the Moa's natural habitat. By 1500, it was gone forever. Shame on us!


Even more shame on us; here's some more long gone gigant birdies that we'll never be able to see again:

Elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus. Up to 3 m tall!

Haast's eagle, chasing some giant Moas (now you do the size math)

The "terror bird" Brontornis, up to 2.8 m!

Source:
Nicolas J. Rawlence, Jamie R. Wood, Kyle N. Armstrongand Alan Cooper. DNA content and distribution in ancient feathers and potential to reconstruct the plumage of extinct avian taxa. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B., June 30, 2009 DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2009.0755