The Elephant bird, the so-called “Madagascar’s giant”is considered the largest bird ever. This bird had eggs big enough to feed an entire family; hence, it is no wonder that they were hunted for food.
Elephant birds were a family of flightless birds that lived on the island of Madagascar during the Pleistocene and Holocene. They are thought to have gone extinct around 1000–1200 CE, likely as a result of human activity.
Elephant birds were related to ostriches and emus. They were the largest birds of their time, standing more than 3 m (10 ft) tall and weighing close to 400 kg (880 lb). They laid giant eggs that were bigger than those of dinosaurs.
Elephant birds were members of the extinct ratite family Aepyornithidae. They were found as fossils in Pleistocene and Holocene deposits on the island of Madagascar.
The New Zealand Kiwi is the closest modern relative of the elephant bird.
Elephant birds are extinct flightless birds belonging to the order Aepyornithiformes that were native to the island of Madagascar. They are thought to have become extinct during the late 1st millennium to early 2nd millennium AD, likely as a result of human activity. Elephant birds comprised three species, one in the genus Mullerornis, and two in Aepyornis. Aepyornis maximus is possibly the largest bird to have ever lived, with their eggs being the largest known for any amniote. Elephant birds are palaeognaths (whose flightless representatives are often known as ratites), and their closest living relatives are kiwi (found only in New Zealand), suggesting that ratites did not diversify by vicariance during the breakup of Gondwana but instead convergently evolved flightlessness from ancestors that dispersed more recently by flying.
It is widely believed that the extinction of elephant birds was a result of human activity. The birds were initially widespread, occurring from the northern to the southern tip of Madagascar. The late Holocene also witnessed the extinction of other Malagasy animals, including several species of Malagasy hippopotamus, giant tortoises belonging to the genus Aldabrachelys, the giant fossa, over a dozen species of giant lemurs, the aardvark-like animal Plesiorycteropus, and the crocodile Voay. Several elephant bird bones with incisions have been dated to approximately 10,000 BC which some authors suggest are cut marks, which have been proposed as evidence of a long history of coexistence between elephant birds and humans; however, these conclusions conflict with more commonly accepted evidence of a much shorter history of human presence on the island and remain controversial. The oldest securely dated evidence for humans on Madagascar dates to the mid-first millennium AD.
A 2021 study suggested that elephant birds, along with the Malagasy hippopotamus species, became extinct in the interval 750-1050 AD (1200–900 years Before Present), based on the timing of the latest radiocarbon dates. The timing of the youngest radiocarbon dates co-incided with major environmental alteration across Madagascar by humans changing forest into grassland, probably for cattle pastoralism, with the environmental change likely being induced by the use of fire. This reduction of forested area may have had cascade effects, like making elephant birds more likely to be encountered by hunters, though there is little evidence of human hunting of elephant birds. Humans may have utilized elephant bird eggs. Introduced diseases (hyperdisease) have been proposed as a cause of extinction, but the plausibility for this is weakened due to the evidence of centuries of overlap between humans and elephant birds on Madagascar.
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