New information on the history of the mysterious “elephant bird”, which went extinct about a thousand years ago, when the first human groups arrived in Madagascar, comes from its egg shells, thanks to an international study published in Nature, to which it attended the University of Turin. Indeed, the rare skeletal remains of the elephant bird do not allow us to determine with certainty the number of species that once existed, nor their geographical distribution, but the biomolecules preserved in eggshell fragments dated to about six thousand years ago have now been able improve knowledge of the evolution and biodiversity of the elephant bird.
The elephant bird (vorompatra in Malagasy) was enormous, with specimens up to three meters tall, it was unable to fly, and represents one of the most fascinating mysteries in the history of interactions between the human and animal species – also because its relative closest is the kiwi, New Zealand’s iconic bird. Traditionally the name is attributed to the writings of Marco Polo, and the elephant bird could be related to the genesis of several myths of the Middle East.
Not being able to fully reconstruct the evolutionary history on a morphological basis, an international group carried out paleomolecular (genetic and proteomic, i.e. to identify the protein system, ed) and geochemical analyzes on 960 eggshell fragments from 291 locations in Madagascar. The study confirmed the separation between two families, Aepyornis and Mullerornis, with different morphologies and sizes, and highlighted a surprising genetic variability existing among the elephant birds of northern Madagascar, suggesting the existence of a new evolutionary lineage.
Source: Ansa
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