Dinornithidae
Status: Extinct (c. 1500)
Anomalopteryx
Dinornis
Emeus
Euryapteryx
Megalapteryx
Pachyornis
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The
moa were giant flightless
birds of
New Zealand. Eleven species are known, of varying sizes, with the largest species, the Giant Moa (
Dinornis giganteus), reaching about three metres in height and about 250 kilograms in mass. They were the dominant
herbivores in the forest
ecosystem.
Moa became extinct around the year
1500 due to hunting and land clearance after humans arrived in the islands. Before the arrival of humans, some moa were hunted by
Harpagornis, the world's largest eagle which is also now extinct. The
kiwi are regarded as moderately close relatives of the moa.
Although the
indigenous Maori told European settlers tales about the huge birds which they called Moa, which had once roamed the flats and valleys, the widespread physical evidence that they had actually existed was never closely examined by early European settlers.
In 1839, John W. Harris, a Poverty Bay flax trader who was a natural history enthusiast, was given a piece of unusual bone by a Maori who had found it in a river bank. He showed the 15cm fragment of bone to his uncle, John Rule, a Sydney surgeon, who sent it to Richard Owen who at that time was working at the Hunterium Museum at the Royal Colllege of Surgeons in London. Owen became a noted biologist, anatomist and paleontologist at the British Museum.
Owen puzzled over the fragment for almost four years. He established it was part of the femur of a big animal, but it was uncharacteristically light and honeycombed.
Owen announced to a skeptical scientific community and the world that it was from a giant extinct bird like an ostrich, and named in dinornis. His deduction was ridiculed in some quarters but was proved correct with the subsequent discoveries of considerable quantities of Moa bones throughout the land, sufficient to construct skeletons of the birds.
In July 2004, the Natural History Museum in London placed on display the Moa bone fragment Owen had first examined, to celebrate 200 years since his birth, and in memory of Owen as founder of the museum.
Though there is no reasonable doubt that the Moa is extinct, there has been occasional speculation that some may still exist in deepest south-westland, a rugged wilderness in the South Island. Cryptozoologists and others reputedly continue to search for them, but none have ever been found, and some might regard such efforts as pseudoscience. In 1993, two people claimed to have seen a bird they suspect was a Moa, but their report was largely dismissed as a hoax.
See also
