Scientists reveal world’s largest bird weighing as much as a dinosaur

A new study has revealed a newly identified species of elephant bird, which is now being referred to as the world’s largest bird that weighed as much as a dinosaur.

The world’s largest bird, which is now extinct, roamed around Madagascar over 1,000 years ago. It weighed as much as 800kgs that is equal to seven modern day ostriches. It was 9.8ft tall, which is 8 inches taller than an ostrich.

The bird named ‘Vorombe titan’ meaning Big Bird had powerful legs and fearsome claws. Like ostriches, this elephant bird too couldn’t fly. “They would have towered over people. They definitely couldn’t fly as they couldn’t have supported anywhere near their weight,” said lead author James Hansford.

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The bones of these monster elephant birds were collected since the mid-1800s, but were misinterpreted to another species of elephant bird until now, informed Hansford. “Understanding the diversity in these extinct giant birds has been a taxonomic knot for some 150 years,” he told Live Science.

Hansford examined elephant bird bones found around the world and fed their dimensions into a machine-learning algorithm for creating a spread of expected animal sizes. Hanford discovered these bones fell into distinct clusters, revealing three genera and four various species.

The average weight of a V.titan bird used to be 650kgs, which is comparable to ‘Europasaurus’, a small, long-necked dinosaur that weighed around 690kgs, wrote Hansford and co-researcher Samuel Turvey in a study published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

Elephant birds ‘undoubtedly had a significant impact on creating and maintaining the landscape in ancient Madagascar and their extinction has left a hole that we need to think about conserving in their absence’, as explained by Hansford. “In effect, we’re using the past to inform conservation plans.”