Giant flying turkeys roamed the Aussie bush millions of years ago
AUSTRALIA: Bones found more than a century ago in Queensland, once thought to belong to a ‘‘giant ancestral pigeon’’, have been described as the remains of a kangaroo-sized flying turkey that roamed Australia more than two million years ago.
Researchers at Flinders University have carefully re-examined the remains of avian megafauna from four states and have concluded that, rather than representing a single ancient bird species, they belong to five different species, one weighing up to eight kilograms and standing taller than a grey kangaroo.
‘‘These discoveries are quite remarkable because they tell us that more than half of Australia’s megapodes went extinct during the Pleistocene Epoch, and we didn’t realise this until now,’’ Flinders University PhD candidate Elen Shute said.
Megapodes are birds that incubate their eggs by burying them in warm compost mounds or underground. Modern Australian megapodes include the malleefowl and brush turkeys.
When the bones were discovered, natural historian Charles Walter de Vis described them as the remains of a ‘‘giant ancestral pigeon’’, Shute said. That first description at the Queensland Museum in 1888 stood for a century before more remains of large extinct birds were found in the Naracoorte Caves in South Australia and a second species was described.
However, in a paper published in 2008, Walter Boles, then at the Australian Museum, claimed they all represented the same species. The new research by Shute and her colleagues at Flinders University upends that finding.
Her work describes birds – the largest of which was more than a metre tall – that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch alongside diprotodons and marsupial lions.
While these birds were chunky, their long wing bones showed they could fly and probably roosted in trees, according to the researchers.
Shute’s study describes the finds from 1888 and the 1970s as two distinct genuses. She also describes two new species of megapode from the Thylacoleo Caves on the Nullarbor Plain in Western Australia, and claims the discovery of a new genus from the Curramulka Quarry in South Australia.
Shute said one of the species described might have lived as recently as 40,000 years ago, overlapping with the arrival of humans in Australia.
Her co-author Professor Gavin Prideaux said there was an ongoing debate about what caused Australian megafauna to become extinct: climate or humans. Working out what species existed with accuracy was important when trying to answer this question.
Scientists still did not have a good understanding of what Australian megafauna species were around and what lived where, he said.
‘‘If you don’t know what was there, it’s hard to speculate on when and why species become extinct.’’ - Fairfax