Scientists identify giant prehistoric bird from Indonesian cave

Paleontologists have identified a new species of giant bird, Megapodius rokusi, from a fossil found in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores.

The discovery originated from a single leg bone excavated in 2009 at a depth of nearly seven meters. While Indonesian zooarchaeologist Rokus Due Awe first recognized the fragment as a bird bone, it took 17 years for researchers to confirm it as a new species.

Hanneke Meijer and her colleagues at the University Museum of Bergen identified unique joint angles and grooves on the bone that distinguish it from known megapodes, a group of birds that bury their eggs in the ground to incubate them using earth heat. The bird lived during the Pleistocene period, approximately 190,000 to 120,000 years ago.

Researchers estimate the bird weighed about 3.9 kilograms, making it three to eight times heavier than the orange-footed scrubfowl, the only living megapode on Flores today. This find adds to a prehistoric ecosystem on Flores where evolution produced unusual sizes, such as dwarf elephants and giant rodents. The researchers noted that the bird may have been a target for the Homo floresiensis, a diminutive human relative known as the hobbit people.

These humans lived in the same cave and used stone tools to hunt large animals. Because megapode eggs have large yolks making up 50 to 60 percent of their weight, the tiny humans might have hunted the giant bird for its eggs. Scientists do not know if the bird could fly or exactly when it went extinct.