"Elephant Birds" by Dr. Erich Thenius,
Director of the University of Vienna's Institute of Paleontology

Numerous remains of ostrich-like birds of genera such as Mullerornis and Aepyornis are known from the Quaternary period of Madagascar. They were found in rock strata which are at most two million years old¹. Like many prosimian species, these elephant birds (suborder Aepyornithes, family Aepyornithidae) became extinct only recently. Besides the New Zealand moas, they are the best known giant birds; even the Carthaginians are supposed to have known about them. Flacourt, the first French governor of Madagascar, was the first to report on these giant ostriches, which make the African ostrich of today seem small in comparison. He stated that a giant bird, called Vouron Patra, was still frequently found in the southern half of the island in the mid-seventeenth century².

The first report of value³ to scientists did not, however, become available until the last century when a traveller by the name of Sganzin sent the sketch of one of the giant eggs to the collector, Jules Verreaux, from Madagascar in 1832. He reported that the natives used remains of such eggs as vessels. Their shell is several millimeters thick, they may be more than thirty centimeters long, and their volume is given as more than eight liters. This corresponds to more than seven ostrich eggs or more than 180 chicken eggs.

The elephant bird differs in several skeletal characteristics from the present-day continental ostrich. They form a separate branch which presumably reached Madagascar very early. This is confirmed by findings from the lower Tertiary of North Africa, which have been called Stromeria and which must have been closely related to the ancestral line of the later elephant birds. They were relatively small, slender-legged forms. They suggest that the division of the ostrich-like birds must have taken place very early, probably in the earth's Middle Age⁴. The similarity of the elephant birds to the moas, which also became exterminated in historical times, cannot be traced to a direct relationship. It is rather a consequence of flightlessness which is related to gigantic size⁵. Within the group of living ratites, the African ostriches are the nearest relatives of the elephant birds, even though they have some features in common with the cassowaries.

---

Notes on this text

1. Two million years ago would place the earliest elephant bird remains at the end of the Pliocene Epoch of the Cenozoic Era--fairly recent. If these birds didn't arise until this time, how did they get to Madagascar, which broke away from Africa and India at the end of the Mesozoic, more than 65 million years ago? A likely possibility is that they flew there, then adapted to an island which had no large predators--until the Malagasies arrived in the last two thousand years.



2. A careful reading of the text reveals that's not quite what de Flacourt said. Quote: "Vouroupatra, c'est un grand oyseau qui hante les Ampatres..." ("Vouroupatra, a large bird which haunts the Ampatres..."). Granted, "haunt" and "frequent" are often synonymous, but there's a difference between having frequented a place, and still being found there frequently. Anyway, de Flacourt was probably reporting second-hand from native sources, since there is no record of his ever having seen the bird. Vorompatra may have already gone extinct by this time, albeit recently, since the oral accounts were still there for the French Governor to hear.



3. Surely de Flacourt's account in 1658 is "the first report of value". Dr. Thenius probably means the first TANGIBLE evidence of the bird's existence didn't come to light until the Nineteenth Century.



4. I interpret "earth's Middle Age" as the Mesozoic ("Middle Life") Era. This would push the division of the struthious (ostrich-like) birds back well before the earliest Madagascan elephant bird fossils. If the ancestral Aepyornithiformes did NOT fly to Madagascar, the traditional view that they were spread all over Gondwanaland would account for their finding themselves stranded on the island when the break-up occurred (just as the other ratites found themselves on their particular parts of the old southern continent). So, what happened to the previous 63,000,000+ years of fossils? Have we just not found them, or is there some other explanation?



5. This point argues for Convergence, that the Moa and Elephant Bird resemble each other for much the same reason the dolphin and the shark resemble each other: they evolved in response to the same challenges posed by their environment. If that's true for these giant flightless birds, then the Ratites may be a polyphyletic assemblage of look-alike birds that are not closely related (at least, no more closely than any two birds are related, for it seems probable that all birds descend from common reptilian ancestors).