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Elephant Bird Egg What a whole Aepyornis egg would have looked like when freshly laid, seen in a market near the town of Toliara on the southwest coast of Madagascar. Credit: Gifford Miller More than 1,200 years ago, flightless elephant birds roamed the island of Madagascar and laid eggs bigger than footballs. While these ostrich-like giants are now extinct, new research from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) and Curtin University in Australia reveals that their eggshell remnants hold valuable clues about their time on Earth. Published on February 28 in the journal Nature Communications, the study describes...

Fewer than 40 such eggs are held in public collections today (The Buffalo Museum of Science, BSNS Q 257) ___________________________________________________________________________________________________ hen humans first arrived on the island of Madagascar around 1500 years ago, they encountered an array of remarkable species that have since gone extinct: gorilla-sized lemurs, giant tortoises, tiny hippos and a huge, long-necked, flightless bird that lumbered through Madagascar’s forests and laid the largest eggs of any known vertebrate, including dinosaurs. The eggs of the Aepyornis, also known as the elephant bird, were a highly valuable food source for Madagascar’s human settlers. With a volume roughly equal to...

Around 5,000 years ago, the island of Madagascar would have resembled a Sci-Fi novel. Strange, prickly forests, gorilla-sized lemurs, pygmy hippopotamuses, horned crocodile and elephant birds whose eggs were 180 times the size of what you'd find in your fridge today, all called the African island home -- that was until the humans arrived.