Author(s): Atholl Anderson (University of Otago, New Zealand)

NZ Natural History

"Prodigious Birds" brings together the history of the field of moa-related research, some 150 years of enquiry. The moa was a large, flightless bird, hunted into extinction by the Maori tribes of New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans. It is unquestionably one of natural history's most astonishing birds, with a full-grown specimen standing at over 3 metres tall. When the first white settlers of New Zealand began hearing tales of such an enormous bird resembling 'a huge domestic rooster, but with the face of a man which lived on air in cave on Whakapunake Mountain' they were understandably incredulous and treated the bird's existence as mythology. Atholl Anderson brings an historical perspective to the development of moa research and its formative debates, analytical methods and results, reviewing evidence from palaeontology, biology, archaeology, ethnography and history.