Towering over nine feet tall and weighing over 1,500 pounds, the aepyornis has a pointy beak and powerful talons.
Sometimes called “flightless giants,” the birds lived more than 1,200 years ago and were deemed Madagascar’s largest land animals.
Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and Curtin University in Australia recently discovered a new lineage of the birds using eggshell remnants, as well as isotope geochemistry and protein extraction. The findings were published last month in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications.
“This is the first time a taxonomic identification has been derived from an elephant bird eggshell and it opens up a field that nobody would have thought about before,” said co-author Gifford Miller from the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at CU Boulder in a press release.
The findings suggest there may have been more diversity among birds than scientists know about, he said.
How did the team discover the new lineage?
The team set out to collect elephant bird eggshells in 2006 from the southern half of Madagascar. Another researcher beat them to it, so the team instead focused on northern half of the island, CU Boulder said on its website.
The researchers used high-resolution satellite imagery to find areas where wind had blown sands away, revealing the giant, ancient eggshells. The scientists found more than 960 eggshell fragments from 291 different locations, then analyzed them.
Previous discoveries have relied on skeletal remains, so this is the first time a new lineage of elephant bird has been identified from eggshells alone, the university said in a press release.
Why are scientists researching the ancient eggshells now?
Until now, the only concrete information researchers had about the birds is that they descended from the flightless ratite family, similar to the New Zealand kiwi.
“The biodiversity and evolutionary relationships within elephant birds have been uncertain and unstable since they were first described over 150 years ago,” the researchers wrote in their paper.