Aepyornis maximus (St Hilaire, 1851)
Height ~315 cm (10 ft)
Description Appearance in life unknown.

An egg over a foot in length - larger than any known dinosaur egg - big enough to hold the contents of 7 ostrich eggs, 180 chicken eggs or more than 12,000 hummingbird eggs, is enough to stir the imagination of even the most incurious person. The Great Elephantbird of Madagascar, the Aepyornis, laid eggs that reached just such a gigantic size - a wonder sometimes thought to have originated the Arabian tales of the monstrous roc or rukh.

Perhaps these mighty objects did provide the basis for the stories, but the colossal raptor of Arabian legend in no way resembles the bird that laid the eggs, for the Aepyornis was very much a ratite and presumably appeared something like a gigantic and excessively ponderous ostrich. Standing around 3 m (10 ft) high, this great creature was by no means as tall as the tallest of the moas, yet it was much more massive in build than any of these species: D. Amadon (1947¹) estimated its weight at around 454 kg (1,000 lb); for comparison, an Ostrich's weight can be given at about 136 kg (300 lb). The great egg is quite possibly as large as any egg has ever been; engineers calculate that structurally and functionally it is impossible for an egg to be bigger².

Although Aepyornis maximus is the largest and best known of the Madagascan elephantbirds, there were, in fact, several species; these survived until fairly recently and seem to have been distributed quite widely over the island in much the same way as moas were once spread across New Zealand. It seems that their natural enemies were few, perhaps only crocodiles - apart from man - posing any real threat. The fossil record seems confined to Pleistocene and Recent remains (from the past two million years only), leaving the early history of the Aepyornithiformes little understood³. Presumably, these developed in the isolation of Madagascar but this may not necessarily be the case; fragments of bone and eggshell found elsewhere have been assigned to the group - although upon grounds that might be considered rather insufficient.

It seems certain that several species of elephantbird survived until just a few thousand years ago but probable that by recent historical times the smaller ones had all disappeared leaving only the monstrous A. maximus extant. It can be guessed that these birds existed either by cropping the lower branches of trees and shrubs, or by grazing; maybe their livelihood depended on a combination of both feeding methods. As man's presence on the island made itself increasingly felt, the birds must have been pinned back into the loneliest and most inaccessible parts of Madagascar.

Little is known of the settlement of Madagascar before the arrival of the Europeans; whether or not Madagascans⁴ actively hunted the great birds is a matter for speculation - presumably some did. Perhaps of rather more value than the birds themselves would have been the eggs, which, surely, were prized by the natives for their food content and also for the ornamental and utilitarian value of the shells.

When the French claimed Madagascar as a possession in 1642, the Great Elephantbird probably still survived in isolated places. Under the heading of 'vouroupatra' the first French Governor of Madagascar, Étienne de Flacourt, described in 1658 'a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places may not take it, it seeks the most lonely places'. Whether de Flacourt actually saw the Aepyornis or whether he relied solely on the testimony of others is not clear. On his journey back to France he was killed by Algerian pirates without further elaborating on his fleeting account.

For the next 200 years the French kept their foothold on the coasts of Madagascar without ever being able thoroughly to explore the interior, and also without gathering further firm word of the Aepyornis. Then, in the early 1830s, a French naval officer, Victor Sganzin, is supposed to have seen a gigantic egg and perhaps even acquired it. It was rumoured that an egg was sold to the natural history dealers Vereaux but that the ship carrying this treasure back to France ran aground on the rocks of La Rochelle, the prize sinking to the bottom. A few years later another Frenchman, this time by the name of Dumarele, claimed to have been shown by natives the shell of an enormous egg. This shell he had tried without success to buy; the owners regarded it as a very rare item and the bird that laid it even rarer⁵.

In 1851, rumours of giant eggs were finally substantiated. Three were obtained and taken to France by a Captain Abadie, together with fragments of bone. Within a few more years, enough bone had been accumulated for a complete skeleton to be reconstructed and any lingering doubts about the nature of Madagascar's giant bird were resolved.

For how long the Aepyornis survived the arrival of Europeans was, and remains, a mystery. It seems probable that it still lived at the time of de Flacourt but the last of the elephantbirds is likely to have expired well before the beginning of the nineteenth century and the awakening of interest in the amazing fauna of Madagascar.

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Notes on this text

1. Amadon, D. 1947. An estimated weight of the largest known bird. Condor 49 159-64.



2. The egg probably is close to this limit: see Alexander's selection for a more detailed discussion of why that is.



3. A valid point which gets raised in other selections: whence Vorompatra? Why is there no fossil record older than two million years?



4. Here I think the term "Malagasies" would be better, since Fuller appears to mean the island natives and that's what they call themselves.



5. By the nineteenth century, "rare" was probably an understatement: the Vorompatra had likely been extinct for more than a century.