From the Vault: Rise of the Moa

point out that we didn't one thing. We didn't really get into the and these episodes where changes in our understanding of the sort of the stature of the moa, exactly how it stood and how tall it would actually be. Uh. We ended up addressing that, I think in a subsequent listener mail episode. But uh, but but I think everything still holds up. I don't think any any MOA experts or MOA's uh had any any other corrections rather than to to point out that we didn't really touch on

that particular issue and these initial two episodes. Wait, So basically the deal is that maybe maybe the moa was more often bent over forwards rather than rather than standing

up straight. Yeah, yeah, I guess. Yeah, it's one of those, um, those situations that come up from time to time in our understanding of fossils, you know, like it's one thing to put the bones together, but another to actually uh display them or position them, uh in a way that would be in keeping with the actual stature of the animal. For instance, we see this in our changing understanding of t rex is over time. You know, you look back at the old illustrations of t rexes, and there were

a lot more vertical, a lot more erect. But if you look at more recent depictions of how a t rex would stand, you know, it's more horizontal. It's more in keeping with the way a chicken carries itself. Okay, we'll keep that in mind. But otherwise, uh, let's let's head in Welcome Too to Blow Your Mind production of My Heart Radio. Hey you welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And to uh introduce today's episode, I thought maybe we

should begin by reading a poem. Robert or you game, I'm game for a little little poetry. In fact, it's not just poetry, it's moetry. I did not make that joke in my head yet, but maybe because I'm not as perverse as you. This is by the New Zealand poet Alan kerr Now's was originally published in nineteen and it's called The Skeleton of the Great Moa in Canterbury Museum,

christ Church. The Skeleton of the Moa, on iron crutches, broods over no great waste, deprivate swamp was where this tree grew feathers once that hatches its dusty clutch and guards them from the damp. Interesting failure to adapt on islands taller but not more fallen than I, who come

bone to his bone. Peculiarly New Zealand's The eyes of children flicker around this tomb under the skylights, wonder at the huge egg found in a thousand pieces, piece together, but with less patients than the bones that dug in time deep shelter against the ocean weather. Not I, some child born in a marvelous year will learn the trick of standing upright here. You can find that poem, by the way, in the nineteen seventy nine Anthology and Anthology

of twentieth century New Zealand Poetry. And yeah, I really love the cadence of that poem. And also I feel like it effectively captures the weird beauty of these reassembled skeleton remains one sees of the mighty moa. You know, we just did Marianne Moore in the paper Nautilus. This

is another poem like that. I love a good poem that genuinely ponders biology like this deals with the evolutionary adaptation of the moa, the flightless birds of New Zealand, uh and and the idea of learning the trick of standing upright. Yeah, now, this is gonna be a fun couple of episodes. I'm really excited about these episodes. So I think that the moa is one of the things that's really keeping me going right now, getting to research,

read about the moa, and envision the moa. Uh No, no matter what where I don't know where you are out there, if you're listening to this, where you are in your previous understanding of of the moa and other flightless birds. But this is a This is a wonderful and weird story that has as a number of number of connections to things we've talked about in the past, but but also some some new angles. We're gonna be talking about evolution. We're gonna be talking about first contact

between man and beast. It's a it's gonna be a fun ride. And there's no better place to start a fun ride than in New Zealand, the land of avian decadence, that's right, and the place where the mammal is truly debase.

That's right because you, I know, obviously the rise of mammals is one of evolutions most celebrated victory stories, right because in part because we are, of course mammals ourselves, and there's perhaps a sense of of the gods and the primordial titans when we consider the age of the dinosaurs that came before us in our own mammalian age

that we have, you know, ascended in now. Well, yeah, I mean there's very much a case of when you look at the Cretaceous paleogy and extinction event that caused the demise of the non avian dinosaurs, Uh, it's quite clear that their loss was our gain, yes, but it was wasn't only our gain. It was also the gain of of birds, and we often neglect the just the exceptional dominance of birds for theirs is the the legacy of the of the dinosaur. And then they remain highly

successful and widespread to this day. They remain masters of the air, frequent masters of the water, and sometimes masters of the land as well. Now, why would birds be the masters of the land, Like they've got the air that seems so much better than the land, why even

bother with the land? Well, of course, the obvious answer there is that is that to be a master of the of the air requires a great deal of energy, and if you don't have to fly around, you quickly find reasons not to Evolutionarily speaking, of course, also if we're talking about mammals and avian dinosaurs or birds, why exactly was it that the loss of the dinosaurs was the gain of these other clades. Well, because suddenly you have all of these uh, these niches in the in

the in in in the in the environment that open up. Uh. That's suddenly a bird can can occupy, or various creatures have the ability to occupy mammals included. But this is where we see the emergence of a number of these different flightless birds. This is where we see the emergence of the terror birds and the demon ducks. Uh. And we'll get into some more examples of flightless birds as we go. Uh, but yeah, to be sure, we still have some amazing flightless land birds with us today, and

some of them are are quite enormous. The largest, of course, is the ostrich. There are two species remaining. There was a third, the Asian ostrich, that went extinct roughly six thousand years ago. Yeah. The two extant species are the common ostrich and the Somali ostrich, and they're both native to Africa. Yeah, and I sometimes I feel like we sometimes over look how cool ostriches are. I find that it's zoos they you know, for one thing, it's a zoo habitat, and and you know it's it's so you're

seeing an ostrich in a fenced in area. But then sometimes the ostrich is in there with a giraffe, which seems particularly unfair because the giraffe, of course, is the is the tallestum extant mammal that we have, And it feels kind of like a dirty trick to showcase the world's the world's tallest extant bird with the tallest mammal which towers over it. Right, It's like I'm trying to show off my muscles, but then you put me next to a gorilla. Yeah. But but we have some other

wonderful examples of flightless birds uh elsewhere. For instance, we have EMUs, which are very fascinating. You get a chance to just look at an emu, just watch an emu as it goes about its business. It's it's remarkable. The castlewary is one of my favorites mine too. There's a castle wary here at the Atlanta Zoo. Yes, Cecil, Cecil the cast Wary, who we we've talked on the show before with friend Jason Ward here in town about Cecil

the Cassowary. Who remember Jason telling us that it's dung is very like fragrant and kind of smells of fruit. Even though it is the I mean not to demonize animals, but when you get up close to it, it is a horrifying beast. Like it's beautiful. Its colors are beautiful. It has the blue and the red and the black feathers. It's a gorgeous animal. But also if you look at its foot, it's foot looks like a puppet from a monster movie. You know it is. It is just a

killing thing. It's got these claws and this scaly, scabby skin. Uh, that's a tongue twister. But yeah, look at a cassowary up close sometime if you just want to be terrified and audit nature. Indeed, yeah, they they can. They can't prove quite deadly if you know, the human comes into close contact with them and there they begin engaging in a defensive behavior. Oh yeah, don't try to look at their feet up close if there is not a like area between you. Yeah. Of course we have other flightless

birds who consider one of the more amazing ones. Of course, it's the key we of New Zealand um, the nocturnal ground bird. All of these birds are what we call rattites, a diverse group of flightless birds that were widespread across the scattered fragments of the supercontinent Gondwana uh and the and their dominance is waned over time, certainly with the rise of Homo sapiens. We still have all these various

examples that still remain today. Yeah, and you find you find large flightless birds, well actually large and small flightless birds everywhere from New Zealand to South America. You know. Then that's without even getting into the the obvious example of just other flightless birds. There's also the penguin of course, but well, this raises the question why do we have

flightless birds all over the place like this? Well, Uh, In the nineteen nineties there was a wonderfully titled theory MOA's arc, which would assume that all of these ra tides descended from a common ancestor. So, in other words, the idea here is that a flighted ancestor became flightless on god Dwana, and then as the supercontinent split, this

one flightless ancestor UH diverged into all these different flightless species. Okay, so you get one instance of these birds descending from an ancestor and becoming flightless, and then the flightless one goes all over the place, and then there's continental drift to supercontinent splits up, and the flightless descendants of that one ancestor all go off into different places and evolve in different directions, and they become everything from the ostrich

to the key we to the moa. Right. But one of the issues with this, UH, this idea is that this would mean we'd expect something we'd expect, say in New Zealand, we'd expect the moa and the Kiwi to be closely related to each other. We'd expect that any any of these ratites that live close together would also be closely related, but subsquent DNA studies have revealed that this was not the case. Instead of MOA's ark, the model seems to be one of numerous cases of flighted

to flightless evolution around the world. So again, convergent evolution. Uh. This repeated instance of a flighted bird evolving into a bird that doesn't fly, which seems so strange of a of a choice for evolution to make. I mean not to personify it too much, but but what is the advantage there? I think we alluded to this earlier. One of the main theories about this is that it's an energy advantage. If a bird doesn't need to fly, then it doesn't need to make huge pectoral muscles capable flapping

wings that can get it into the air. And if it doesn't need to make those big muscles, it can spend that energy on something else, or it can just survive on less food. Yeah. Uh, And it can have just like a smaller it can have less of a basal metabolic rate. And we've we've talked on the show pretty recently about birds having a pretty high BMR. So, so, yeah, this is basically the reason why we see the rise of these various flightless birds in you know, all corners

of the world really. But then of course a number of them end up falling away, and of course we'll get into the details of of of the fall of the moa in these episodes. Uh, in the case of the moa and in the case of the elephant bird, it's it's the encountering human beings that did the trick. Yes, once again, human beings seem to be a sort of anomaly in the fossil record in the evolutionary story. Once

we enter the picture, things tend to go haywire. But another question is coming back to what we were just talking about, like the energy considerations in losing flight. So it is clear that you can save a lot of energy by not being a flying bird if you don't need to fly, But in what case what a bird not need to fly? Shouldn't flying always help a bird

to survive? Well, basically it comes down to, like like we said earlier, the death of the dinosaurs creating these these holes for these niches for it in the environment. You need a place where I mean to to use a very simple, even tacki metaphor here. For birds, they need a place to land, uh, in a place it's not already occupied by say a highly successful dinosaur or

highly highly successful mammal. And so there there are corners of the world uh you know, other shards of Gondwana where the the the idea of a kingdom of the birds remained at least partially unchallenged by mammalian usurpers. Like nothing came nothing was already there to keep the bird from landing, and nothing came up to to erase it

from the ecosystem. Um. For instance, there's the island of Madagascar, which enjoyed something like eighty eight million years of isolation, during which it fostered various forms of lemur, as well as the massive elephant bird uh, not only a rattite but often considered the largest known rattite to ever walk the earth. But then there's also far are flung New Zealand, which enjoyed an amazing degree of freedom as well from the mammalian revolution, well until roughly um c e with

the arrival of human beings. Now that's not to say they were completely free of mammals. That believe they're too extinct. Primitive mammals known only as the Saint Bathans mammal that are present in the in the fossil record from the Miocene. Otherwise, the only way for a mammal to get to New Zealand was to fly there or to swim there. So you'd have this huge island that's got birds on it,

but does not have any large mammalian predators. It doesn't have any lions, it doesn't have any wolves, it doesn't have any foxes anything for a bird to need to fly and escape from. Yeah, so if you don't have a predator you have to fly and escape from, why even keep making wings? Exactly? You just you land and you start filling those niches. There's no buffalo there, no horses again, no wolves. And then the as far as

the other mammals, the ones that have swam there. I mean, we're talking about seals, sea lions, whales out in the waters around New Zealand. And they they're they're they're not gonna invade the forest anytime soon. Uh, they're doing just fine.

And then other than that, we have bats. Bats flew to New Zealand where we do see you do see an interest in case where where the bats that come to New Zealand end up spending more time on the ground than you see elsewhere in the world, particular the New Zealand lesser short tailed bat, which spends a lot of its time foraging on the forest floor crawling around, um, basically taking on a far more terrestrial role than bats

employee elsewhere. Again, this would make sense as an evolutionary adaptation if there's just not a lot of stuff to worry about on the ground like there is everywhere else. Yeah, Like we mentioned the kiwi earlier, Like the kiwi is an example of a ground dwelling bird. Uh, you know, it goes around at night, it eats things like worms, but there's nothing there's nothing like a mole there. There

are no moles to fill that niche in the environment. Uh. Therefore the kiwi is is taking that role on even though it is a bird. Now you do see some cases where reptiles or gastropods are also you know, filling in these these niches in the environment in New Zealand, But for the most part, the birds are the real stars here. Um. We mentioned the kiwi and there are there are numerous other examples of flightless birds in New Zealand.

There's a There are various extant species that we still find, such as the South Island tacky heat and then there's also a flightless bird known as the Weka. But the most amazing examples are the nine now extinct species of moa, including the giant moa that used to uh To to exert their dominance over New Zealand. Well, maybe we should take a break and then when we come back we can talk about this giant bird. Alright, we're back, So we just introduced the character of the moa. This I

guess we alluded to a little bit earlier. But this giant flightless bird that used to inhabit New Zealand, that's right. Yeah, there were nine different nine different species are known to exist. There's the upland moa, the little bush moa, and I have to stress the little bush moa was still one point three meters or four point three ft tall, so it's still the sizeable bird. Wait is it now? Is it the little bush moa or the little bush moa? Uh? The little bush moa sometimes just referred to as the

bush moa. I'm just trying to think. I mean, is it like a bush moa that's little or is it being compared to a little bush or something? Oh, I think it basically lived in the bush bush mooa would have would have lived more in the rainforest. So essentially the moa is so successful. You have all you have like nine different varieties and different parts of New Zealand, different sizes. But the two largest word dinormous robustus which

means robust, strange bird and dinormous novels O Lindia. So we're largely gonna be talking about those two because they were the biggest. We're talking about moa that reached the heights of three point six meters or twelve feet tall, that's with the neck outstretched and there with with estimated weights of two or five and ten pounds. So these were these were sizeable critters. They looked rather like an

enormous emu. So if you've seen an emu in in person, you have like a good starting point for imagining them. Like a wide, kind of shaggy feathery body on long, uh you know, lethal looking legs with these great claws at the end and a long snaking neck you know, almost like a like a like a like an elephant's trunk that leads a two comparatively small head. Yes, and the skeletons. It's almost like a comically small looking head

compared to the giganticness of its body. But so another one thing I would wonder about, of course, is Okay, well, we know it's probably flightless, but what does it do with its wings? Does have a little a little like t rex arm talons up there, or what's happening with the wings? Well, that's that's typically what you expect, right. Flightless birds typically have at least vestigial wings, a little

shrunken remnants of their long neglected flying limbs. Uh. Sometimes, as with an ostrich, there's still some sort of a use for these wings. The ostrich uses it's it's so it's little wings there to stabilize them when they run and to aid in courtship displays, even though there you know, they do not produce flight at all. Right, Well, I mean you can see, uh, some birds that are thought to be flightless actually do kind of glide near to

the ground. Some like chickens, can use their wings to you know, kind of glide around near the ground, right, and be even failing that, like sometimes there's some purpose, even if it's a display, right, And even if there's not a purpose, you might expect to find, as with other flightless birds, to find some vestigial remain of that limb, you know, like little bones or something. But the moa doesn't even have vestigial wings. There are no little not

like even like shrunken bones that are left over. There is no trace of their wings at all. They have simply been erased through their evolution. That's creepy, It's yeah, it's amazing, it's it's it's one of the very few known creatures to possess only two limbs. The only other creatures that I could run across that were in a similar situation at all are the Mexican mole lizard and

the Serenada salamanders. Both of these are cases where creature has lost its hind legs and retains its its front limbs. But you won't find any mammals that are like this. Even the hind legs of the great whales remain in this digital form um. No, you find no other birds, no dinosaurs, just these nine species of giant land birds, even the t rex. So it's you know, famously small um four limbs. So we've we've discussed the very theories for why they kept even those those tiny limbs on

the show before. But even the t rex still has little little arms. The moa has no arms, no, no wings at all. It's just such a strange creature. The other day, I was imagining it as a kind of biological unic cycle. Yeah, it's it's so weird. It's it's like some of the illustrations look oddly huggable, but it has no arms, it has no wings, like there's nothing. I kept thinking, like, why does this? Why is this amaze me? So? And I think part of it is

that when we think about animals. So I've noticed when when children think about animals, they often embody the animal. You know, they have to act like the animal, and you know, pandomimement and so forth is a fascinating tendency. By the way, why do they naturally do that? But I think even if we're not like actually moving our bodies around, when we look at animal, there's part of us that like puts ourselves in its body, and we imagine our limbs as its slims. And this creature has

has no, uh, nothing like arms at all. So if you're you're trying to get this in your head, just you know, stop. If you have a chance, look up some images of the moa, of its skeletal remains, and also reconstructions of what it would have looked like, and just focus on the fact that it has no vestigial wings.

It's just so wonderfully weird. Now. I know you said it it looks huggable, and I sort of agree, but I do want to stress if they actually recreate these things and bring them back from extinction, do not try to hug them. No. No, it's a very bad idea. Right. Yeah, we discussed how potentially lethal the castle areas, and the same can be said of the ostrich So I think without a doubt the moa could do some serious damage

or still around to kick you. Oh and by the way, if you if you want to look up some images of the moa or just get additional information about them, I highly recommend checking out New Zealand Birds Online, created by ornithologist Colin ms kelly. It's a great Uh, it's it's great. It's one of the sources we use for

these three episodes. Uh, and you'll find you find it an in z birds online dot org dot in z and if you go to the search bar and you type in moa, you'll get pictures of all nine varieties. Illustrations of all nine varieties of moa. Now, one thing that's kind of interesting about the moa is we often tend to think, okay, where there are large land dwelling animals,

they often tend to be few in number. Right but the but for a long time, New Zealand was kind of the land of the moa, right Yeah, Yeah, the moa where New Zealand's dominant land vertebrates and dominant herbivores. So they basically went went around consuming twigs, leaves, flowers, seeds, and berries from a wide variety of trees, shrubs, and vines. They also ate um, mushrooms, which we'll get into a

little later. Uh. They were able to process a highly fibrous diet due in part to large gizzard stones and tough beak, so that those gizzard stones were involved in some great curses probably so excellent magical items. Um. But yeah, so they're they're basically every again, nine different varieties, like basically adapting over time to the different environments of New Zealand.

And uh, they laid enormous eggs and are suspected to have produced I think one or two per breeding season, and the incubation period was likely longer than two months. So big birds, big eggs, um more of a time investment in a limited number of eggs, and the male likely incubated the eggs, as this is what is seen

in extent ratites. I don't think I knew that. Yeah. Now, just because it was the dominant land organism doesn't mean it was completely unopposed that it was off the predation of hook because again, this is the world of birds, and and when you think of birds, you probably think of a number of different flesh eating varieties. And so the moa too had to contend with a my at avian predator, and that predator is the largest eagle to

ever live. Right, So at this point, I want to briefly come to one of our favorite subjects, which is monsters. Why are there so many monster movies about giant spiders but not about giant lions? Uh, with a lion is already large enough, right, yeah, exactly. So I've got a hypothesis here. I think humans, whether through instinct or learning or combination, of both do a lot of intuitive phylogenetic

sorting of predatory threat imagery. So the idea of a large cat that kills and eats you is in fact terrifying, but it's not especially unusual in the terms we've talked about on the show before, in the terms of cognitive science of religion, it's not even minimally counterintuitive. It's just sort of a fact of nature. So it would be terrifying if you were really faced with it. But it's also not a particularly arresting image in the memory, and

that it doesn't stand out. I mean, I'm sure it would be a memory if it actually happened you, but probably not in terms of fictional storytelling. Compared to something like a giant spider, A large man eating spider is definitely counterintuitive. It's not something found in nature, and because the image is unusual, it sticks in the mind and captivates our fear. And I have to think about this for a while. Like the idea of a human being eaten by an invertebrate like an insect or an arachnid

not only feels scary, it feels perverse. It violates the natural order. In biblical terms, I think this is what would be called an abomination, And so I think our brains do this kind of unconscious threat math a lot. We sort potential threats from animals or organisms more generally by morphology or body shape, which is a simple way of sorting them along evolutionary relationships. Large carnivorous mammal shapes are natural predators. They are genuinely threatening in reality, but

less captivating of the terrified imagination. And I think the same goes for large reptilian shapes like crocodiles or sharks or whatever. But here's another phylogenetic or morphological branch of potential threats. How about birds. I think we intuitively sort birds into the non predator pile, right, Like we prey on birds, they don't prey on us, right, Yeah, for

the most part. I mean, now, to come back to the cassawary and the ostrich Like, clearly, these are both potentially dangerous animals that they're encountered in the wild, but they are you know, they're kind of exceptions from the rule. They are a rather different rate of bird than the the sort of bird that most of us are going to encounter on a daily basis, right, And they wouldn't be trying to hunt us. Like, if we encountered one, you know, a cassowary in the wild and it was

being aggressive, that would probably be it. You know, from its point of view, it's acting in defense. Right now, if we were to travel in time back to the age of the terror birds and the demon ducks, and that would be a little would be a different scenario. Yeah, but I would say that that age might go a lot, it might come a lot more recently into his story.

Then we would think, uh so, maybe this, this intuitive sorting about birds is one of the main reasons movies that use dinosaurs as monsters resist putting feathers on them, right, even though many predatory dinosaurs probably had feathers, we associate feathers with birds, and birds are generally not thought of as scary, right, Yeah, when, for instance, when let's think of all the times feathers are used for comedic effect, right, like a feather, pillow, feathers, uh, you know, stuck to

a person after you know, something sticky has has has gotten on them, that sort of thing. Yeah, And so there's that. But then on the other hand, and pretty much in exactly the opposite direction, of what I just said, we want to think again about the counterintuitive thing. A lot of times monsters are great because they violate these categories. You know, no spider actually preys on us in the wild, but we love the giant killer spider idea that sticks

in the memory. There are a lot of stories about it, and there are stories of giant predatory birds that do show up in monster mythology all around the world. There's the Rock, the cocketry Ice, the winged on Zoo from Sumerian and Babylonian myth Like do you remember how in Bander Snatch it says that the demon packs is the thief of destiny. The humanoid bird monster on Zoo is the original thief of destiny. Do you know about the story?

So in this there's this ancient Accadian epic where on Zoo the bird, the humanoid bird monster steals something called the Tablet of Destiny from the King of the Gods. And the Tablet of Destiny is kind of like this great law book that's sort of a like the permanent record of everybody. It's got like all of their you know, the I don't know, all their lawbreaking or whatever written down in it. And possessing this document, this tablet gives

you the power to rule the world. And so when on Zoo the bird monster steals it, he has to be destroyed, I think by Marduk. Well that's what Marduk's for, right, It says that's pretty much his job. I mean Marduke. It's funny. Marduk is the hero of the story. But in in my feeling, mar Duke's also. He's often kind of the party pooper, Like there's a great monster getting up to no good and then mar Duke comes in

and just puts a lid on everything. Yeah, he's the humanoid figure that that that gets rid of the interesting characters. He's like the assistant principle that comes in and stops the party. Um. But so I think the bird as man eater story it does pass the minimally counterintuitive test for mythological resilience. If a giant hawk could swoop down from the sky and bite your head off, that image

that makes a good story that would stick in your memory. Um. So, I'm not sure how exactly that goes in conflict with the fact that, like people won't put feathers on dinosaurs and movies because they're not scary enough. Maybe maybe these things two things are just both true and in competition

with each other. Like the feathered monster has a cognitive advantage because it's more counterintuitive, stands out in memory, but the scaly monster has a cognitive advantage because it's physical features are more naturally prone to activate our threat responses. I don't know what you think is going on there, but I, as we we love to think about monsters,

and I think that tension is interesting. Yeah, and and and again we're talking about the idea of monstrous birds here, not just birds perceived as a threat because certainly there are people that are afraid of birds or a little weeked out by birds when they're close to them. Certainly Hitchcock's the Birds managed to strike a nerve with people.

But yeah, the idea of a a bird being large enough to do not just like pester you, or to h or two certainly in a large number attack you, but like a single handedly take you out and consume you, to prey on you, to to hunt you as if you were its dinner. Yeah. Now I want to talk for a moment about a very important fossil in physical anthropology, which is a fossil skull that is between two and three million years old. I think last time I saw the dating it was like two point eight million years old.

They thought it was unearthed from a quarry in South Africa in nineteen four in a place called Tongue And it is the skull of a young hominid now known to be from the extinct human relative Australian Epithecus africanus. And note that this is a different species from australia Epithecus afarensis, which is the species to which the famous lucy skeleton belonged. Uh So this Africanus skull is known as the Tongue Child. And evidence indicates that this hominid

died when it was about three years old. And we actually have a lot of evidence now indicating exactly what happened when it died, how its death came about. Just warning, this is a kind of sad and grizzly story, but also biologically fascinating. So the Tongue Child skull has puncture marks in the bone at the bottom of the eye sockets. And these puncture marks are similar to the marks made on other mammals like monkeys when eagles attack them. Today.

Also the skull was found in a soil bed, along with eggshell fragments, as well as the bones of many other small animals, including rodent lizards, juvenile antelopes, and baboons, and a lot of these other bones also show damage that looks like it could have been caused by the beaks and talents of a large eagle. The South African paleontologist Lee Burger has argued that it was an eagle

that killed this child. He argued for the eagle predation hypothesis, for example, in in a short communication I was reading to the journal the American Journal of Physical Anthropology in two thousands six, writing that quote re examination of the tongue juvenile hominin specimen the type specimen of Australia Epithecus africanus reveals previously undescribed damage to the orbital floors that is nearly identical to that scene in the crania of

monkeys preyed upon by crowned hawk eagles, and Burger argued that this evidence, along with the strange collection of other animal bones at the side of the tongue child's discovery quote, strongly supports the hypothesis that a bird of prey was an accumulating agent at tongue, and that the tongue child

itself was a victim of a bird of prey. I think this is an example of how scientific writing so often has a way of stating things that is like facially abstract, bordering on euphemistic, but so much so that it actually sounds more horrifying. So this bird of prey millions of years ago was not a bone collector, but an accumulating agent. Well, that makes it look that sounds like it was working for some dark other force. Right. Yeah. Now, if this hypothesis about the town child is correct, uh,

and from what I read, I think it probably is. Uh. We don't know for sure exactly what kind of bird killed the child, but the paper I was just quoting from draws attention to the similarities between the marks on the fossil skull and the wounds left by a modern bird of prey. It still exists today, called the crowned hawk eagle or stefan Ouida's coronatus, also just own as the crowned eagle. This is a truly frightening and magnificent bird.

So it lives throughout central, southern and eastern Africa, mostly inhabiting like mountains and forests. Rainforest places with tall trees also sometimes found in the savannahs. These eagles can weigh up to ten pounds or about five kilograms, with a wingspan of up to six feet or about a hundred and eighty centimeters. They're large, they're not the largest eagle. The females are generally larger than the males, and the crowned eagle gets its name from a crest of feathers

on the head. Sometimes it's got feathers sticking straight up, but sometimes it looks just like a bulging of the feathers towards the back of the head and looks a little bit like Gary Oldman's weird vampire bun head from the Francis Ford Coppola Dracula. It does really yeah, d d you see what I'm saying? And plus the spirit of of the two are closely linked here. Yes, I imagine this eagle also loves the children of the night because life Dracula. This bird is an astonishingly strong hunter.

They've been known to kill prey more than four times their size. And I think this is this is key too, because certainly, even in an urban environment like in Atlanta, we see vultures and hawks fairly common. Hawks especially, you see them around a lot because there's a lot of

a lot of creatures for them to prey on. We went into the the urban advantages of the hawk in our one of our previous episodes, Oh Yeah, we talked with Jason Warred about the about the peregrine falcon and it's urban hunting methods where it will sit up on top of a building and wait for its prey birds to fly underneath, and then it die of bombs them

from above. But generally you think about a bird like this grabbing a bird of this nature, grabbing something like maybe a salmon, maybe it grabs a squirrel, maybe maybe it even gets a small dog, But you don't think about them grabbing something four times their size. Right now, if they grab something four times their size, they're not going to be able to carry it away, but they can totally kill this thing and either eat it where it falls or take it apart and take pieces with them.

So when attacking large prey, the predatory strategy of the crowned eagle often involves it'll it'll involve swooping down from above and then using their meaty legs and fearsome hind talents to break the prey animals spine when they make contact. Uh. They hunt a diverse range of prey, including monkeys, antelopes, and other small mammals and lizards. Uh. And they've, like

I was saying, two basically feasting strategies. Once they've got a prey animal dead, if it's small enough, they'll try to carry it with them up to a safe tree top to eat at their leisure. If the prey is too large to carry, they will either eat it where they have killed it, or sometimes they'll they'll they'll tear you know, chunks of it off. They'll tear off ahead or tear off an arm or something and take it away with them one piece at a time. Another interesting

fact about them the crowned hawk eagle sometimes uh. Well, so they generally lay one or two eggs nest brood, and if there are two eggs, when the eggs hatch, the larger of the two chicks usually kills its sibling. The parents are known to guard their newborn chicks very ferociously. You know, they violently repel encroaching animals. And so you might have a question, well, would these powerful hunters that can kill animals much larger than themselves, would they be

able to attack humans today? Uh? Possibly, but if so, it is rare. I don't want to, you know, get you in the idea that you should be afraid of or demonize these birds. But there are a few accounts of crowned eagles attacking children. The accounts are mostly older. It was kind of hard for me to tell how

much stock we should put in them. But such a claim of crowned eagle attacks on humans does not at all seem to be unheard of, and they do regularly attack monkeys, which of course are shaped a lot like us, and small human children would be within the size range of their prey. Remember, they can attack prey more than four times their size, so they can attack animals that are maybe like forty five pounds, or again be in

awe of their predatory strings. I don't mean to demonize these animals because I know their habitats are threatened now and their numbers are declining. And but in general, a smile child is likely to to flip certain switches in a in a sizeable predator that might normally not not switch on when they see a fully grown human. Oh well, yeah, I don't know if you ever looked up those videos on the internet of small children against the glass and like lion enclosures at a zoo. Oh, I mean I've

I've taken my son when he was smaller. I remember taking him to uh some sort of a zoo like uh place somewhere in Arizona. I think maybe it was Arizona even But but when we were there, it's like there was a one part. We're walking out. There were these cages and they had some large predatory cats, and you can just see them like there's a change in the way they are viewing their surroundings. There's a change

in their body language. You can you can tell that they're you know, even if they're not actively hunting your child, they're reacting to it as if it is potential food. Yes, I mean the same way that the human instinct is activated by a small child. You know, most adult humans would see a small child and want to say, is that child okay? You know you want to take care of them delicious. Yes, the looks very small, very weak,

easy easy kill. Not to shame any of these predators, that's just that's just the coating, that's the basic way of the tooth and claw. They're right. So you've got these claims of modern eagle attacks on on human children. But if these claims are generally correct, even then it does appear to be a kind of unusual thing to happen,

you know, something that just happens here. And there was there ever a predatory bird that would have had humans more firmly within its prey buffet, but you know, even larger, even more diverse in the kinds of prey it would seek out. And that brings us back to New Zealand and the age of the Moa, and the moe is primary enemy. It's it's primary predator, the has eagle. So the Maori people of New Zealand have had legends of

gigantic birds. Apparently there are several different legends of gigantic birds that have been linked to somewhat too real bird species. The two different legendary bird monsters that I was reading about from the Maori where the ta Hokioi or the Puakai. But there may be other legends that sort of fit into this mix as well. Right, and uh, and in real quick I want to again, remind everybody that the Maori came to New Zealand less than a thousand years ago.

So we're talking um roughly CEU. We'll we'll get more into into the history of the Maori and they're they're coming to New Zealand and their eventual interaction with other human beings uh in our in our second episode. But just remind everybody about the time frame we're talking here. So this this giant bird monster of Maori legend. It's a huge bird with black and white feathers. It's got a red crest and yellow green coloring on the tips

of its wings. It was believed in some legends to have raised the hawk to the heavens, and was known in other some legends as a man eater. It's not only a feature of Maori oral tradition, but it's it's terrifying frame appears in archaic rock carvings of the area, and many paleontologists now believe that the that this animal, the ta Hokioi or the Puakai, is not purely fictional

mythical as a monster like the on Zoo. It may be the cultural memory of this real giant predatory bird of New Zealand known as the Host's eagle or Harpagrnus mori, which again would have been the predator that preyed on the moa because again less than a thousand years ago when the Maori arrived, when the archaic mawory arrived in New Zealand, they would have encountered uh the nine species of moa. They would have encountered hosts eagle in its predation of the moa. Like all this was the world,

this unique environment was in full swing when they first arrived. Yeah, hosts eagle was a beast. I think if we saw it we would be in awe It could way up to fifteen kilograms, which is about thirty three pounds. The female might have had a wingspan of up to three meters or almost ten feet. Like other birds of prey,

often the female was larger than the male. Remember that the most powerful predatory bird in the world today not the largest, but the most powerful hunter, the crowned eagle, weighs up to only about ten pounds or about five kilograms. It's like three times bigger, and with their size and hunting power, the Hosts eagle could and did regularly take down moa as prey, And to think about how amazing this is given the size of the moa. What were

we saying about the size of the moa earlier? Oh, we talked about ten to twelve feet with their with their head stretched out. I mean even the even the bush moa was like four and a half feet tall, you know likens, Yeah, the little bushma. Yeah, I'm sure

they were. They were really at a loss here. So a predatory encounter might have involved waiting at say a tree top near a water source, and then waiting for a moa to come out and take a drink, and the hosts eagle could then swoop down at the moa at eighty kilometers per hour about fifty miles per hour. And again, think of something that weighs forty pounds hitting you at about fifty miles per hour. Some forensic analysis of the bones of the hoste eagle, I know there

was some analysis done through cat scans and things. Uh, this shows that the eagle's body was by design able to absorb shocks from high impact speed. Um So at the impact, the predator comes in, talents out and it has talents that could penetrate bone. So after killing the moa, or the other large prey bird. The eagle could usually take its time eating the kill in the spot because they were not large mammalian predators to worry about coming along.

Because this is New Zealand, Yeah, yeah, I've I've also heard it. Heard it described that the talents of Hastie eagle were about the size of a tiger's clause that's how big they were. Yes, So I was reading an article in The Independent that interviewed Paul Scofield, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. This was in two thousand nine and Scofield is also the author of one of the papers that was doing the forensic analysis of

the hosteagle skeleton. And also, by the way, the Canterbury Museum is the same place where Alan Curnow saw the most skeleton that he writes the poem about. But so Schofield says, quote, it was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child. They had the ability to not only strike with their talents, but to close the talents and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis.

It was designed as a killing machine, so think about so it comes in with the clause extended can hit you at high speed with amazing force and then latch on with the clause to cut through flesh. And this would of course leave you bleeding and all of that. And Schofield said, hass eagle wasn't just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird, it was the equivalent of a lion. Wow, yeah,

a lion of the air. Again, it's just a it's like an order of magnitude beyond any kind of flying predatory bird that we we've become accustomed to in our world today. Yeah, I mean, I guess I think like a like a griffin, you know, like this, this is a flying it's like a flying big cat if a

leopard could fly. So again, the Maori arrived, they encountered this world, and uh, you know, and we'll discuss the details of this later, but basically the moment would last scarcely more than a century after that they were they were rather swiftly eradicated by human beings, and therefore hass eagle, since it depended on the moment for food, it went

away as well. But there would have been time there, so there was there was There was a period of time and Mallory history, for their for the archaic Mallory and for the the moa hunting Mallory. For for them to have their children picked off by this terrifying bird, this terrifying predator of the sky. It's hard to imagine, but I just did. We're terrifying predators of the land

are bad enough when they can come from above. I don't know what that just seems like that would that would entail a whole reordering of the way you view, you know, danger and safety in the world, because you generally think the sky at least is safe. I don't need to look that way. All right, We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back and for more discussions of the mighty moa. Thank alright, we're back.

So one question that comes up. We're imagining this this clash between these enormous moa and this enormous eagle, clash of the giant birds, and so I was wondering, well, how does how would a giant moa defend itself? Like, what kind of fight could it put up? So we already mentioned if we look to extent to ratites, we looked to the Austrians, we looked to the castle Wary, we see excellent examples of just how ferocious a kick from one of these creatures would be. But then you

start imagine. So if you're imagining, say, say an unarmed human coming up and trying to start start a fight with say an Austria's or castlewary or perhaps a moa, that's not a good idea. You can imagine how that's gonna go kick wise, um, you know, or or any type of land predator trying to mess with one of these these creatures. But if something is coming from above like it does seem, and I couldn't find a lot of sources on this about like what the MOA's defensive

capabilities would have would have been. But if it, certainly, if it had trouble kicking that high, what could it do if something was attacking its back, you know, it could it could pack at it. It could use its beak certainly, Um maybe and this is just me guessing, I'm thinking maybe it could whip it with its neck a little bit. That is that is the strategy we see with giraffes. You know, there's there's footage of giraffes fighting each other with using their necks as these broad

whips and certainly the cat. Certainly the MOA's neck was was long and tough, but I don't know if it could actually have used it effectively, certainly against host eagle, which again is this this lion of the sky attacking it with enormous talents and perhaps making pretty short work of it if it got the drop. Well, yeah, if you're coming out a large bird like the moa from below, I mean obviously that that's not the place you want to be. But what does it do on its back?

I mean, it seems like the perfect place to pray on it. You can make wounds on the back of a large bird like this. That is, it's exposed, and you know, if you could get the talents in there and get out, even if you don't break its back when you first hit. Uh, probably just like what bleeds to death, it's it's there and drowns in its own blood. Yeah. So it seems like a case where the moa was

just particularly vulnerable to hass Egel. But at the same time, it means hoss Eagle was particularly depended upon the moa like they were they were locked in this. In this you can say eternal struggle. I guess you want to get be dramatic about it, but really an eternal balance until until this new force, this new terror, came to

unbalance that that equation. Yeah, well it's um I mean, it's weird to think about because, like when you see a predator chasing prey in nature, I think naturally most of our sympathies are with the prey animal, and that makes sense. Like you know, if you were to see one person trying to hurt another person, your sympathies are with the victim. But in in nature, you could think about it as a as a kind of balanced thing because the predator is also trying It's just trying to survive.

It is fighting starvation every every day, in the same way that the prey animal is fighting the predator that's trying to kill it. Right, and again we already mentioned We'll get into some of the genetic data on this in the next episode, but the MoMA was highly successful and it was spread all over New Zealand, so you know, it was a situation where it could support a dominant

predator like this. Their numbers were such that the predator was ultimately playing an important role in supporting a healthy moa population. Yeah, totally. I mean, one thing I've read is that the hostagel probably would have been very few in number, right, like most apex predators, right, you know, they tend to be their needs to be many fewer of them than there are of the prey animals or

the or the ecosystem can't sustain itself. Now, it's it's easy to grasp why the extinction of the moa came hand in hand with the extinction of of the great hass eagle. But extinction impacts a wide variety of species. And when you have such an established creature as the nine moa species, you have a lot of organisms that

have come to depend upon them. So you know, you're talking about bacteria, parasites, fist gavengers, predators, but also whatever plants and fungi have come to depend on their feeding habits to propagate. And so I ran across an interesting

study that got into some of this. In two thousand eighteen, researchers from the University of Adelaide's Australian Center for Ancient DNA or a c a D published a study in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences about the contents of dried dung from four varieties of giant moa. Thank god, we're getting into some copper lights. Yeah, I mean, can you can learn a lot from copper

copper lights. You know, they're highly useful and uncovering the especially in this case, the genetic records of diet, pathogens, and even the behavior of the creatures in question. So the researchers here found that the moa consumed a wide variety of mushrooms and fungi, including species that are critical for New Zealand's beach for us, and they were they

were very interested. The researchers were very interested in exploring the prior but unproven hypothesis that many New Zealand fungi with bright colored fruiting bodies are adapted for dispersal by native ground dwelling birds. Now this couldn't really be tested because all the moa are extinct, But but this gave them a chance to sort of to explore it a little bit, right. So, in general, they found confirmation regarding

diet in a few moa species. So they found that the little bush moa, for instance, which would have resided in the rainforest fed mostly on fibrous forest vegetation. Upland moa and giant moa were widespread dietary generalist, with upland moa populating the higher altitudes, so they would have eaten, you know, a wider variety of things. But the mushroom contents of the moa dung uh certainly contained plant symbiotic fungi that the wide ranging moa would have spread as

they ranged, grazed and pooped. According to lead author Alex Boast, then PhD student at Land Cara Research quote, worryingly introduced mammals which consume these mushrooms don't appear to produce fertile spores.

So this critical ecosystem function of the giant birds has been lost, with serious implications for the long term health of New Zealand's beach for us, So what does that mean that, um, the mushrooms passing through the digestive system of the birds would have still been reproductively viable, but going through mammal digestive systems, they're not right. The mammals that have come in to fill that ecological niche that was left by the by the now extinct moa like

there they'll eat the same mushrooms. Perhaps they'll even spread them, uh even you know, travel you know, to decent distances. But the spores they leave behind are not viable. They're not able to actually uh fulfill the role that the moa fulfilled in spreading those spores. And again, those the mushrooms uh have this crucial relationship with with the trees of the beach forest. So um, this is again I think it's just a it's a wonderful example of of

the cascading effect of extinction. They also found evidence of parasites in those copper lights. They found a quote surprising diversity of parasites, many completely new to science. Oh boy. And these are these are largely parasites that would have been exclusive to the moa uh and or the moa species in question that just went extinct with their hosts.

And these included, for instance, various types of nematodes. Uh. So you know again, you you can't take a species out of the out of the game without impacting numerous other species as well. And it's certainly going to be the case when you have such a firmly established and dominant species as the moa of New Zealand. I'm mourned for the Moa. Yeah, it's hard not to, you know, I mean, I do want to stress that that and we'll get more into the relationship between the Moa and

the Maori people in our next episode. But it is crucial not to not to feel a special amount of shame over over the hour in this situation, because again, anytime human beings have come into contact with new ecosystems, they have brought extinction with them. We change everywhere we go. Yeah, and that's that is just that is the nature of human beings. Um, you know, no, no matter where they go,

no matter what the time period. We did a previous episode where we talked about Roman extinctions just brought on by the spread of Roman civilization. Um. And we previously mentioned the elephant bird of Madagascar, similar situation. Uh, it was was doing really well than humans came and that spelled its doom. Now, the story of that doom in the case of the Moa is something we're going to get more into in our next episode. Though. You know,

I just thought of another thing from Madagascar. I believe I was just reading earlier today that a an extinct relative of the crowned eagle of Africa was the Madagascar crowned eagle. But it's gone because when humans came to Madagascar, they hunted its primary prey animal, the giant leam or, to extinction, and then it had no prey anymore. There you go, all right, So so we just keep doing it. We just keep doing it. And yes, some some amazing creatures have been lost along the way. But I tell

you the moa. It I'm just really impressed with this animal. I think it is my It is my my new spirit animal for these trying times we live in UH. I will I will ease myself into the imagined arms of the moa. It has no arms, it has no wings, but there's something about its nature that I can I can cuddle up with and uh and find comfort in. You're gonna become the lower ax of the ratty. It's you're gonna go on a quest where you want people to stop using the ostrich as the example animal of

like cowardice and ignorance. I'm gonna have to I need to get out of the house and go look at some rattites this uh this weekend. There is there's an email that loves fairly close to my house. Yeah, what's its name? Big Glue? Biglue the EMU. I don't think I may have to go feed Big Glue this weekend. Okay, I don't think gotta know about Big Lue. Oh well, I'll tell you about it when we go out the air.

Find Big lu for yourself, all right. In the meantime, go and check out other episodes of Stuff to Blow Your Mind. They're a bunch of them. You can find them wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also find us by going to special blow your Mind dot com. That will shoot you over to the I Heart listing for this show. Wherever you get the show, just make sure you rate, review, and subscribe huge Thanks as always

to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you would like to get in touch with us with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hello, you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you're listening to your favorite shows. B b by By tint to four foot fo