One of the largest living birds, the Southern Cassowary, has a simple throat structure similar to the fellow Australian emu. Now new research confirms a common link between the cassowary and small flighted South American ...
Plants & Animals
Jan 13, 2020
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(PhysOrg.com) -- The evolutionary history of New Zealand's many extinct flightless moa has been re-written in the first comprehensive study of more than 260 sub-fossil specimens to combine all known genetic, anatomical, geological ...
Archaeology
Nov 18, 2009
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(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have assumed the ancestors of modern flightless birds were also flightless, but results of new research suggests they only became flightless and began to explore the ground when it became safe ...
(Phys.org) —A new study conducted by an international team of researchers points to humans as the cause of the sudden extinction of all species of moa in New Zealand approximately 600 years ago. In their paper published ...
(Phys.org) —Until it became extinct in the 15th century, the moa, a flightless bird, played a significant role in New Zealand's ecology. In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Alan ...
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have performed the first DNA-based reconstruction of the giant extinct moa bird, using prehistoric feathers recovered from caves and rock shelters in New Zealand.
Plants & Animals
Jul 1, 2009
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New research by the University of Otago and the Department of Conservation provides evidence that moa may have been indigenous on Rakiura / Stewart Island shortly after human arrival.
Paleontology & Fossils
Nov 15, 2021
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(Phys.org)—A small team of researchers from Flinders University, Centro de Investigaciones en Ciencias de la Tierra and the South Australian Museum has found evidence that suggests large flightless birds that once lived ...
A new study suggests that the flightless birds named moa were completely extinct by the time New Zealand's human population had grown to two and half thousand people at most.
Plants & Animals
Nov 7, 2014
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Some of the largest female birds in the world were almost twice as big as their male mates. Research carried out by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) shows that this amazing size difference in giant moa was not due to ...
Plants & Animals
Apr 9, 2013
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The moa were eleven species (in six genera) of flightless birds endemic to New Zealand. The two largest species, Dinornis robustus and Dinornis novaezelandiae, reached about 3.7 m (12 ft) in height with neck outstretched, and weighed about 230 kg (510 lb).
Moa are members of the ratite group in the order Dinornithiformes. The eleven species of moa are the only wingless birds, lacking even the vestigial wings which all other ratites have. They were the dominant herbivores in New Zealand's forest, shrubland and subalpine ecosystems for thousands of years, and until the arrival of the Māori were hunted only by the Haast's Eagle. It is generally considered that most, if not all, species of Moa died out by Maori hunting and habitat decline before European discovery and settlement.
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