Extinct Madagascar Bird.

Manawatu Herald, 23 May 1895, Page 3

Extinct Madagascar Bird.

« The French Academy of Sciences has accumulated an interesting and varied collection of the relics of extinct Madagascar birds, Bh owing that some of them exceeded in dimensions any elsewhere known, oveitopping the Moa and the Dinormis Gigantaens and the Ornithor* hyncus of New New Zealand, and making the ostrich of Arabia and the Cassomary of New Guinea look beside them like Spanish game cocks or Amsterdam storks. What the whale is to existing mammalia these prodigious Madagascar birds must have been to their kind, rivalling the proportions of the roc of fable, or the simory, king of birds, to'd of in Persian story, that had its throne on an Asian mountain summit and was hidden for ever from the vision of its subject birds as of men. An egg of the Madagascar variety, it is computed, if it were possible to restore its freshness, would make an omelette for the whole Academy of Soiences. At any rate, its cubic contents, as determined by the precise measure* ments of specimens preserved there equalled that of 147 hen eggs, constituting the amplest testament of our position which the feathered tribe has so far contributed to palseozoic discovery.