Elephant birds were believed to be the largest flightless birds ever to have lived on Earth. They measured about 10-foot-tall, 1,000-pound which lived on the islands of Madagascar, off the eastern coast of Africa which later were extinct in 17th or 18th century.
- Despite its name its was nowhere neat to the size of a elephant but it could easily make a young elephant its pray, the largest of this species ever lived were 10 feet tall and weighed about half a ton, still enough for it to be the biggest bird ever to live on Earth.
- This Bird tend to evolve in self contained island environments restricting itself to Indian ocean island of Madagascar.They had a advantage with plenty of lush and tropical vegetation.
- There are a dozen fossil eggs of Elephant bird around the world, one at the National Geographic Society in Washington, two at the Melbourne Museum , and a whopping seven at California’s Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology. In 2013, an egg in private hands was sold by Christie’s for a whopping $100,000.
- Its believed that most of the Elephant Birds were tree-dwelling lemurs picking low-lying fruit, which grew in abundance in this tropical climate.
- Its believe that human settlement was directly related to the Elephant Bird’s extinction in Madagascar, its been around 700 to 1,000 years they have extinct.