“We met a terrible winged dragon … one day out hunting with a soldier who was accompanying me, we saw one at the foot of a tree, that rose into the air as soon as we saw it, with a horrible hissing and red eyes of fire. Just a few years later in 1667 another French colonialist known as Ruelle describes another encounter with a near mythical beast: This bird was described as having keen vision, being too fast for men to catch and when approached "sought the loneliest of places". His 1648 publication "Histoire de la Grande Isle Madagascar" details a second-hand account of the "Vorounpatra" (Vouron = bird, patra= Ampatres or the Mandrare basin of the Androy region in the very south of the island). The first recorded account of a large bird in Madagascar comes from French colonial commandant, Étienne de Flacourt (1607-1660) who was resident in Fort Dauphin in the extreme south of the island. Owing to poor records and the considerable confusion brought about by competitive natural historians of the 19 th century seeking to become the leading authority on these charismatic birds, they were almost forgotten to science for over 100 years, with little-to-no rigorous review of their diversity, life history or extinction process. These extraordinary birds, that reached the upper limits of known avian body size and had the largest eggs of any known animal ever, disappeared within the last millennium. Wells and modern television documentaries by Sir David Attenborough. The enormous Quaternary avian megafauna of Madagascar, the "elephant birds", have intrigued natural historians for centuries, inspiring mythical tales of "the Rukh", the science fiction of H.G. As guilty as humans may be nowadays of triggering enormous losses in biodiversity, black and white explanations and oversimplifications rarely hold up to complex realities, as is well illustrated by the actual history of the elephant birds. Humans, it seems, did eventually cause the extinction of elephant birds but the circumstances were very different from those that have previously been presumed.
Together with increasing evidence of a non-human cause for ice age megafaunal extinctions, it is a serious blow to the prevailing overkill hypothesis. This finding has far-reaching implications. Humans and elephant birds are now known to have coexisted on Madagascar for several thousand years.
As James Hansford now expounds in this essay, this view is most likely wrong, at least in the case of elephant birds. giants should.have chosen to drop dead almost simultaneously.and just coincidentally when the first humans arrived." (quote from Guns, Germs, and Steel).
Jared Diamond once could not "fathom why. This has become known as the "overkill hypothesis" - although perhaps "overkill dogma" would be more appropriate due to the predominance of this belief in mainstream media and science. Along with other iconic megafauna species they are believed to have become extinct soon after their first contact with modern humans due to their overexploitation as a food source. The huge elephant birds, the heaviest known birds to have ever walked this planet, once called Madagascar home. Such appears to be the case with the leg bones of elephant birds that have recently been brought to light from museum drawers and subjected to close scrutiny. What's in a bone? At times the end of a dogma.
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