大象传媒

The huge bones of herbivores have been discovered in a New Zealand forest and found to be bird bones. A skeleton is graphically reconstructed to show that it had three toes and an extraordinarily long neck, and stood over 2m tall. The first human settlers named these giants moas, and they included the tallest birds ever, which weighed 200kg. There were a dozen species including smaller moorland ones with thicker feathers. There were no mammal predators in New Zealand at the time, but the moas were hunted by another bird - the New Zealand giant eagle. It was immense and had talons big enough to stab through a moa's flesh. The moas survived for a million years, until people arrived and hunted them to extinction.