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from the try-stuffing-that-into-the-oven dept.
This Was the World's Largest Bird. It Weighed as Much as a Dinosaur.
The world's largest bird — a newly identified species of elephant bird — weighed as much as a dinosaur when it strutted around Madagascar more than 1,000 years ago, a new study finds.
This monster bird is now extinct, but it weighed as much as 1,760 lbs. (800 kilograms), or about as much as seven modern ostriches when it was alive. It also stood a whopping as 9.8 feet (3 meters) high — a good 8 inches (20 centimeters) taller than an ostrich. And, also like the ostrich, this elephant bird couldn't fly.
[...] V. titan is so big, that its average weight of 1,430 lbs. (650 kg) is comparable to Europasaurus, a small sauropod (a long-necked dinosaur), which weighed about 1,500 lbs (690 kg), Hansford and study co-researcher Samuel Turvey, a professor at the Zoological Society of London's Institute of Zoology, wrote in the study.
When the herbivorous elephant birds went extinct about 1,000 years ago — largely because of human hunters — the Madagascar ecosystem changed. Plants that depended on the birds to eat and disperse seeds floundered.
Unexpected diversity within the extinct elephant birds (Aves: Aepyornithidae) and a new identity for the world's largest bird (open, DOI: 10.1098/rsos.181295) (DX)
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Thursday September 27 2018, @08:57AM
And, Mr. pretent-smartypants who thinks he's thought of everything, you haven't - even when you're measuring the gravitational weight (wow - did you see how easy it was to neologise a term that disambiguates the concept?), you're not measuring its gravitational weight - you're measuring its gravitational weight minus its buoyancy. Pahhhh!
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves