Moa Goofs
Supposedly up-to-date encyclopaedias, written by experts, can still get it wrong. The author of the entry below (a university professor from the USA, who shall remain nameless) would seem to have not read any of the primary literature on moa for the last ten years.
“Moas, order Dinornithiformes, are recently extinct flightless land birds that inhabited New Zealand...The wings were reduced to tiny vestiges1, and the breastbone, or sternum, was flattened, lacking the downward-projecting keel of flying birds. Their skeletal structure indicates that moas are perhaps most closely related to the small, flightless kiwis2 of New Zealand...When the Maoris colonized New Zealand about a thousand years ago, they developed a culture heavily dependent on moa hunting. This may have been3 a factor in the decline of the birds. It is uncertain when the last moas became extinct. They existed at least until the 1600s, and a few eyewitness reports suggest that at least one small species may have survived until the 1800s4...The earliest fossil remains of moas are from the transitional time between the late Miocene and early Pliocene, about 12 million5 years ago. A recent classification recognizes 13 species6 and 6 genera in the single family Dinornithidae.”
- Moa had no wings at all, not vestiges.
- The skeleton may suggest this, but the recent molecular evidence doesn’t.
- Scientists are more certain than this writer about the effect of Maori on moa.
- The 1800s sighting has been reasonably well refuted.
- Our oldest fossil moa is only 2.5 million years old.
- Recent means 1976. But that number's been out of date for some time now.
This quote is taken from a recent edition of a popular CD-ROM encyclopaedia. If this is representative of their research, you decide how accurate all the other entries are likely to be.