Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
instead thought “really big avian traces,” linking these hillocks to
Sylviornis
and
Megapodius
as more likely tracemakers for these landscape-altering features.
Othersizeablebirdsonislandsincluded:thegiantswansofMalta(
Cygnus fal-
coneri
); the moa-nalo, consisting of four species of ducks in the Hawaiian Islands;
the Viti Levu giant pigeon (
Natunaornis gigoura
), which was on one of the Fiji is-
lands; and the giant cursorial owl (
Ornimegalonyx
sp.) of Cuba. All of these birds
were flightless, and as one might guess from the adjective “giant” applied to their
common names, they were significantly larger than any of their living relatives; for
instance, imagine a 1.2 m (4 ft) tall owl prowling the forests of Cuba. All of these
birds had something else in common, which was their rapid extinction soon after
humanscameincontactwiththem,foundthemdelicious,introducedeggpredators,
andchangedtheirhabitats.Fortunately,tracesagainhavehelpedfillinafewdetails
aboutthebehaviorsofthesevanishedbirds.Forinstance,moa-noladietsareknown
through their coprolites, which showed these were important grazers in Hawaiian
ecosystems that lacked mammals as herbivores.
Althoughalloftheserecentbirdswereimpressivelysized,nonewerepotential
predators of people. So perhaps the closest situation comparable to
Jurassic Park
,
in which theropods could have preyed on people only half their size on a remote
island, was during the Pleistocene Epoch and on the island of Flores, Indonesia.
Bones from about 12,000 to 100,000 years ago there include remains of both the
largest known stork (
Leptoptilos robustus
) and a diminutive species of hominin
(human relative),
Homo floresiensis
, nicknamed the “hobbit.” The size disparity
between these two species was like that between
Utahraptor
and a modern
Homo
sapiens
. The storks were just shy of 2 m (6.6 ft) tall, whereas adult
H. floresiensis
stood only a little more than 1 m (3.3 ft) off the ground, and stork tracks were prob-
ably twice as long as the hominin tracks.
Also, storks, despite being associated with heart-warming fables of delivering
babies, are voracious carnivores. Hence, these big storks, rather than fulfilling
