Eastern moa
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| iEastern Moa | ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Prehistoric
|
||||||||||||||||
| Scientific classification | ||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
| Emeus crassus (Owen, 1846) |
||||||||||||||||
|
|
||||||||||||||||
|
Dinornis crassus Owen, 1846 |
The Eastern Moa, Emeus crassus, is an extinct species of ratite bird belonging to the moa family. It is nowadays recognized as the only species of the genus Emeus.
Emeus was of average size, standing 150 cm (5 ft) tall. Like other moa, it had vestigial wing bones, hair-like feathers (beige in this case), a long neck and large, powerful legs. Its feet were exceptionally wide compared to other moas, making it a very slow creature. Because of this, human colonists hunted Emeus into extinction with relative ease. Like almost all moa, it was gone by the year 1500.
It has been long suspected that the "species" described as Emeus huttonii and E. crassus were males and females, respectively, of a single species. This has been confirmed by analysis for sex-specific genetic markers of DNA extracted from bone material; the females of E. crassus were 15-25% larger than males (Huynen et al., 2003). This phenomenon — reverse size dimorphism — is not uncommon amongst ratites, being also very pronounced in kiwis.
[edit] References
- Huynen, Leon J.; Millar, Craig D.; Scofield, R. P. & Lambert, David M. (2003): Nuclear DNA sequences detect species limits in ancient moa. Nature 425(6954): 175-178. DOI:10.1038/nature01838 HTML abstract Supplementary information
- Owen, Richard (1846): [Description of Dinornis crassus]. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 1846: 46.
- Reichenbach, Heinrich Gottlieb Ludwig (1852): Avium systema naturale, plate XXX.
 |
This prehistoric bird article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
 |
This New Zealand-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
