Birds Used To Be, Well, Absolutely Huge!

It was not that long ago when birds towered over humans, birds weighing in at over one thousand pounds, where have they all gone?

In New Zealand there is still the occasionally reported sighting of the now-extinct 12-foot Giant Moa, thought to have become extinct around 500 years ago. More recent are discoveries by scientists of birds no one would expect to be huge today. Prehistoric parrots standing at just under a meter tall, penguins you could look in the eye. Why is it, birds used to be so huge, and where did they go?

Paleontologists think the main reason for their size is down to one thing, the almost complete absence of predators.

New Zealand, a fairly isolated island nation, was home to many of these giant birds. The already mentioned Giant Moa, kind of looks like a giant Emu, the Giant Eagle amongst many other now-extinct avian megafauna.

The islands of New Zealand were for the most part free of large mammalian predators, without this constant threat many birds no longer needed the advantage of flight. And they grew huge, boy did they grow.

Giant Penguins, for instance, were found in Antarctica and New Zealand, and evolved around two million years after dinosaurs disappeared, along with other large ocean reptiles. Without fear of becoming lunch, they lost flight and became huge, just like their land-living cousins.

Again we ask the question, why so huge? According to Gerald Mayr, one of the researchers being large could have something to do with thermoregulation and heat loss. Another researcher Trevor Worthy, who located evidence of the giant parrot, thinks it may have also allowed these birds to fill an ecological niche the mammals would have usually filled. That of eating low-energy food in quite large quantities.

A problem for these island birds, though, was that they were likely a bit lazy. “I think many larger birds on islands were just big, not fast or ferocious,” Worthy said in an email.

Because their main evolutionary adaptation was their size, they quickly faltered when other, fiercer competitors came on the scene. For many island birds, that competitor was humans, who both hunted birds directly and began capitalizing on their resources. Faster birds, like the emu and the ostrich, were able to survive despite newfound competition.

In the case of the giant penguins, which sought food in the water, toothed whales and pinnipeds arrived on the scene millions of years later and likely drove them to extinction by outcompeting them.

The case is slightly different for the Pachystruthio dmanisensis, a giant bird discovered in Crimea and the largest ever found on the European continent. It coexisted with large mammals unlike island birds, but researchers think it was likely fast, an added evolutionary advantage.

Despite these ancient birds’ impressive girth, whole skeletons of person-sized penguins aren’t exactly littering the landscape. Most of these discoveries have been based on small fossil fragments such as a bone or a body part. Worthy attributed these discoveries to dedicated paleontologists, and a bit of luck.

“It is just a matter of serendipity and opportunity,” Worthy said. “In the last 100 years no one looked anywhere near as hard and regularly. Effort is rewarded.”

For more details please go to vice.com.

This Cockatoo is told he is going to the vet, wait for his reaction.

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