Vorompatra Lore


from

The Macmillan Illustrated Encyclopedia of
Dinosaurs and Prehistoric Animals

by Dougal Dixon, Barry Cox, R.J.G. Savage, & Brian Gardiner

(Macmillan, 1988: p.177)*

Malcolm Ellis' Vorompatra NAME: Aepyornis titan1

TIME: Pleistocene to Recent

LOCALITY: Madagascar

SIZE: up to 10 ft/3 m tall

The extinct, flightless birds of the genus Aepyornis, of which this species is the largest, were heavily built creatures, probably weighing up to ½ US ton/500 kg. Their common name--elephant birds--stems from old Arabian tales of a giant creature the "rukhkh," that could pounce on an elephant and carry it up into the air. Aepyornis may be the legendary "roc" bird encountered by Sinbad in The Book of a Thousand and One Nights2.

Each of Aepyornis' elephantine legs ended in 3 stumpy toes, which were spread wide to carry the body weight. The thick thigh bones were greatly elongated, evidence that this bird was not a runner, unlike its relative, the ostrich--the fastest creature on 2 legs.

Aepyornis laid huge eggs--more than 1 ft/30 cm long, with a capacity of some 19 US pints/9 liters, and when fresh they may have weighed 20 lb/10 kg.

Apart from size and strength, the elephant bird had no special defenses--no teeth in its beak, no talons on its feet, no wings for flying. But the only large predators in its island home were crocodiles, easily avoided. When man arrived in Madagascar, less than 1500 years ago, species of Aepyornis were still alive. This bird may have become extinct only in the 17th century.

* NOTE that this book was recently revised & reissued as the Simon & Schuster Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs & Prehistoric Creatures and is available through Amazon.com or Barnes & Noble.

Notes on this text

  1. Almost all sources call this bird Aepyornis maximus, which is what the French zoölogist St-Hilaire named it in 1851. It appears that sometime since that, another specimen was given a new specific name. Apparently the birds are one and the same, and priority rules (that is, St-Hilaire "called it first"), but you can't kill some things with a stick...


  2. Another quibble: what Sindbad met was not the Vorompatra you've grown to know & love, but the tale could have been inspired by an encounter with a real ratite. Imagine what could have been--a sailor on unexplored shores runs into a 10-foot-tall ratite that doesn't know what to make of the sailor either. Later it occurs to the man: what if that was only a chick? How big would it be full grown? How do I get OFF this island!?