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Do scientists know what caused the extinction of the elephant bird?
According to scientists, it’s evidence that the elephant birds of Madagascar were hunted and butchered for food. Rather than wiping out the animals in a short time, humans seem to have lived alongside the birds for thousands of years, before they went extinct around 1,000 years ago.
Is the elephant bird extinct?
Extinct
Elephant bird/Extinction status
When did Aepyornis go extinct?
Aepyornis is a genus of aepyornithid, one of three genera of ratite birds endemic to Madagascar until their extinction sometime around AD 1000.
How long did the elephant bird live?
Probably, elephant birds live during the Late Pleistocene in the transition towards Holocene (which is lasting until today), approximately 43.000 years ago….The White-lipped Bright-eyed Frog.
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How did the elephant bird protect itself?
Legends told of the fearsome roc which ate elephants – in truth, aepyornis was an herbivore. Even so, it had little to worry about predators thanks to its large size. When the situation called for, it could have also used its feet and heavy beak to protect itself in conflicts with others of its own kind.
How did elephant birds evolve?
“We found that elephant birds and kiwis arose from a common ancestor around 50 million years ago,” said lead study author Kieren Mitchell, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Adelaide’s North Terrace Campus in Australia. In fact, elephant birds are only distantly related to ostriches, the researchers said.
How long ago did the dodo bird go extinct?
The birds were first seen by Portuguese sailors about 1507 and were exterminated by humans and their introduced animals. The dodo was extinct by 1681, the Réunion solitaire by 1746, and the Rodrigues solitaire by about 1790.