Birds · Dinornithiformes · Dinornithidae

Giant Moa

Dinornis robustus

Extinct

No living individual remains anywhere in the world. See full glossary

The South Island giant moa was the tallest bird that has ever existed: females reached 3.6 metres with the neck extended, although in natural posture they stood around two metres. It had no wings at all, not even vestigial ones, a case unique among birds. It browsed the leaves, twigs and fruit of New Zealand's vegetation. The Māori arrived in New Zealand around the year 1300 and within barely a century or a century and a half, hunting and the burning of forests had wiped out all nine moa species.

Weight

100 kg – 250 kg

Size

2 m – 3.6 m

Diet

Herbivore

Feeds mainly on plants.

Activity

Diurnal

Active mainly during the day.

Social structure

Solitary

Lives and hunts alone, joining others only to breed.

Sighting difficulty

Impossible (extinct)

Temperate forestMountainIslandsHerbivore Diurnal Solitary Bird Temperate forest Mountain Islands

1countries

Fun facts

GeneralIt stood 3.6 m tall and died out some 100 years after the Māori arrived.
It belongs to the only bird group known with no trace of a wing at all: the moas did not even have the reduced wing bones that ostriches and emus retain.
Its disappearance was sudden: the nine moa species are reckoned to have gone extinct within less than two hundred years of the human arrival in New Zealand, one of the fastest documented extinctions of any megafauna.
Almost all birds reach adult size in under a year; the moa took close to a decade to attain skeletal maturity. That life strategy, workable on islands with no land predators, became lethal when the first Polynesian settlers arrived around 1280-1300, and it is regarded as one of the causes of its rapid disappearance. It also showed extreme reversed sexual dimorphism: the females reached 2 m at the back and around 200 kg in average weight, and the males barely a third of that.

Life cycle & biology

Skeleton type: Vertebrate - internal bony skeleton (bird)
Habitat & environment: Temperate forest and scrub of the island
Sexual maturity: Close to ten years to reach skeletal maturity, a juvenile development with no equivalent among living birds
Litter / clutch size: 1 egg

Sources consulted: https://www.iucnredlist.org/ | https://animaldiversity.org/ | https://es.wikipedia.org/