Sculptor crafts $125k extinct bird creation out of scrap metal

Jo McKenzie-McLean 05:15, Sep 16 2019

Wanaka artist Luke Wilson created the sculpture of two extinct birds in combat to show the flight of our native animals.

A Kiwi artist has resurrected two extinct native birds using cutlery, hot water cylinders and horse shoes.

Luke Wilson's Haast Eagle Vs Moa took more than two years to make using scrap metal – a skill he discovered while working at Wanaka recycling and reuse shop Wastebusters.

"I'd been working at Wastebusters processing their metal recycling for about a year and realised I had a knack for putting things together with odds and ends. It got me wanting to work with material that has a story behind each piece that comes in."

Wanaka-based artist Luke Wilson, 31, will exhibit his giant scrap metal sculpture of a Haast eagle and moa at a St Andrew's College fundraiser in Christchurch on September 20 alongside several other artists.

The 31-year-old's engineering background has helped produce the sculptures, as has late nights, copious amounts of coffee, a No.8 wire mentality and a passion to portray the world's natural beauty in his art while raising awareness about the plight of native birds.

"I work up a mountain and there is kea up there. Their population is declining and they are really special birds."

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Security increased at NZ archaeological sites in effort to thwart pillaging of moa bones

By Amy Williams for rnz.co.nz

Security has been beefed up at caves where moa bones are at risk of being pillaged, as the Government moves to make it illegal to trade remains of the extinct bird.

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage said more cameras with remote alarm sensors had been installed to protect archaeological sites from looters trying to make a quick buck.

This is ahead of the Government's plans to consult the public about possible regulation changes to stop the trade of moa bones.

"People are trifling with the law if they think they can get away with taking moa bones from sites," she said.

"We would encourage people to recognise that moa full skeletons in museums and other scientific institutions are really valuable. Selling bits of skeletons, bones, on TradeMe and elsewhere reduces the availability for scientific institutions to have these whole skeletons."

Not a single kiwi feather can be traded and yet the remains of one of the world's rarest extinct bird species continue to be bought and sold on the open market.

Just this week, a moa skull and foot bones of undisclosed provenance sold on TradeMe for almost $3000.

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A New Zealand man found 12-million-year-old footprints left by an extinct 500-lb bird

By Natasha Frost May 12, 2019

When New Zealand’s first settlers arrived in the country in around 1300, they found a series of islands with lots of seafood, not much by way of edible plant life, and some of the most extraordinary flightless birds the world had ever seen.

Over millions of years, New Zealand had developed a unique ecosystem. It has almost no native mammals and is instead home to a vibrant array of avian life—at most recent count, some 378 species, many of which cannot be found anywhere else in the world. Without the risk of mammal predators, a striking number are shockingly defenseless, and spend their lives trotting sweetly—and vulnerably—along the forest floor.

Moa should not have been at risk. These enormous birds stood twice the height of an adult man, and weighed nearly three times as much. They had few natural predators, beyond the now-extinct Haast’s eagle, with their size weapon enough against almost anything. But they were slow, unwieldy, and possibly quite delicious. With few alternative sources of food, New Zealand’s newly-arrived Maori people quickly grew accustomed to killing and eating them. Within a century, the birds were gone forever.

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Moa for sale: trade in extinct birds' bones threatens New Zealand's history

Skeletons fetch thousands, but sales put swathes of environmental and climate data out of reach of scientists

Eleanor Ainge Roy in Dunedin

Wed 16 Jan 2019 19.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 16 Jan 2019 22.43 GMT

Paleontologists are begging the New Zealand government to immediately halt the trade in the priceless bones of the extinct moa bird, fearing that millions of years of science is disappearing as entire skeletons are broken up and sold over the internet or smuggled overseas.

Moa, giant flightless birds which stood up to 3.6m tall, were endemic to New Zealand and became extinct about 500-600 years ago. When they were first discovered by Europeans they were considered a scientific marvel and kickstarted a global frenzy, as museums competed to acquire specimens.

Under New Zealand law it is legal to sell moa bones and egg shells found on private land. There is no requirements for experts to sample or study the bones, or survey the site, as is standard practice in the UK and many other countries. In November a private collector in Britain purchased an entire moa skeleton for $34,000 in West Sussex.

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New Zealand's large moa did not disperse large seeds

April 18, 2018, University of Canterbury

A new study about New Zealand's extinct moa, involving acid baths and concrete mixers, by researchers from the University of Canterbury and Landcare Research, has revealed a surprising finding about their ability to disperse tree seeds.

For decades it had been assumed that New Zealand's largest native fruits evolved to be eaten and spread about prehistoric landscapes by the large extinct moa. The new study, published today (18 April) in the prestigious Proceedings of the Royal Society B, casts doubt on this theory.

By examining the seeds found in 23 preserved moa gizzard samples, and 152 ancient moa droppings, the authors have shown that although moa consumed some of New Zealand's largest fruits (up to 15mm diameter), their muscular, stone-filled gizzards pulverised all but the tiniest of seeds. Only seeds less than 3mm diameter were found in the droppings and were therefore capable of being dispersed by moa.

Lead author, University of Canterbury (UC) Ecology Ph.D. student Jo Carpenter says that part of the reason people had assumed that moa dispersed the large seeds – such as from miro, mataī, hinau, pōkākā, and pūriri trees – was due to the thick seedcoats, potentially requiring severe abrasion (as would have occurred in the stone-filled gizzards of moa) for rapid germination.

"These seeds seem poorly adapted for dispersal by birds that are alive today," Carpenter says. "We were amazed to find that even silvereyes, which are one of New Zealand's smallest fruit-eating birds, can disperse seeds significantly larger than the giant moa were dispersing."

To confirm their suspicions, the researchers subjected miro and hinau seeds to a simulated passage through a moa gut, by tumbling the seeds in a stone-filled concrete mixer followed by bathing in a warm, weak acid bath. They found that this treatment did not actually increase the speed of germination as had long been suspected. In fact, the seeds still took between two and seven years to germinate.

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New Zealand's moa were exterminated by an extremely low-density human population

A new study suggests that the flightless birds named moa were completely extinct by the time New Zealand's human population had grown to two and half thousand people at most.

The new findings, which appear in the journal Nature Communications, incorporate results of research by international teams involved in two major projects led by Professor Richard Holdaway (Palaecol Research Ltd and University of Canterbury) and Mr Chris Jacomb (University of Otago), respectively.

The researchers calculate that the Polynesians whose activities caused moa extinction in little more than a century had amongst the lowest human population densities on record. They found that during the peak period of moa hunting, there were fewer than 1500 Polynesian settlers in New Zealand, or about 1 person per 100 square kilometres, one of the lowest population densities recorded for any pre-industrial society.

They found that the human population could have reached about 2500 by the time moa went extinct. For several decades before then moa would have been rare luxuries.

Estimates of the human population during the moa hunting period are more sensitive to how long it took to exterminate the birds through hunting and habitat destruction than to the size of the founding population.

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Humans Wiped Out Giant New Zealand Bird

MAR 19, 2014 03:59 PM ET // BY TIM WALL

 

Nine species of giant, flightless birds, known as moas, suddenly went extinct within two centuries of humans’ first arrival to New Zealand. Coincidence? No, a team of geneticists, biologists and archeologists recently wrote. The scientists found evidence that moas thrived before Polynesians colonized the islands in the 13th century.

The scientists analyzed genetic remains from 281 individual birds from four species of moa. The researchers looked for signs of dwindling moa populations in the 4,000 years before humans arrived. When animal populations shrink dramatically, their genetic diversity also decreases. Instead, the moa had a healthy variety of DNA, which suggested strong populations.

For example, the 3.6 meter (12 ft.) tall South Island giant moa (Dinornis robustus) had an estimated population of 9,200 individuals that may have been growing. Although another species, the 1.5 to 1.8 meter (4.9–5.9 ft.) tall eastern moa (Euryapteryx crassus), showed signs of a major historical die-off, that reduction in numbers likely occurred more than 17,900 years ago, thousands of years before humans arrived. Euryapteryx crassus had recovered and seemed to be thriving in the eastern lowland forests of New Zealand by the time humans arrived.

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DNA Barcoding Give Clues about Extinct Moa Birds

Researchers have used DNA barcoding techniques to undertake a study of the moa, an iconic and extinct species of bird native to New Zealand.

Scientists know there were at least nine species of moa endemic to New Zealand, but because the flightless bird died out hundreds of years ago due habitat decline and overhunting, it is challenging to gain a complete understanding of the birds, some of which could stand as high as 12 feet with their necks fully extended.

"Despite more than 100 years of research being devoted to the issue, determining species status is challenging, especially where there is an absence of substantial morphological, physiological, and behavioral data," said lead study author Leon Huynen an ancient DNA expert based at Griffith University.

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Moa bird bones reveal DNA half-life but Jurassic Park remains fiction

Moa birds disappeared from New Zealand following the arrival of human settlers in the 13th century, but their fossils now provide us with a valuable clues about long-term DNA survival and how DNA decays over thousands of years.

In a paper published today in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, we show that fragments of DNA from these extinct, flightless birds can be used to estimate how DNA decays over time. The findings have implications in choosing where to look for DNA-containing fossils and in forensic casework involving bones.

Sadly, the findings won’t satisfy those people wanting us to talk about dinosaur DNA. When telling someone our day-job involves working with ancient DNA (aDNA), more often than not, the response is: “Ahhhh, you mean like Jurassic Park?”.

Then we explain how resurrecting the dinosaurs is not possible and that the early papers describing isolation of dinosaur DNA were likely based on a combination of contaminating human and chicken DNA.

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Moa's Ark: Why the Female Giant Moa Was About Twice the Size of the Male

Apr. 9, 2013 — Some of the largest female birds in the world were almost twice as big as their male mates. Research carried out by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) shows that this amazing size difference in giant moa was not due to any specific environmental factors, but evolved simply as a result of scaling-up of smaller differences in male and female body size shown by their smaller-bodied ancestors.

The paper is published April 10 in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Sir Richard Owen with skeleton of Dinornis.

In an environment lacking large mammals, New Zealand's giant moa (Dinornis) evolved to be one of the biggest species of bird ever, with females weighing more than two hundred kilograms -- the same as about 3 average sized men.

Male and female birds often show differences in body size, with males typically being larger. However some birds, like many ratites -- large, flightless species such as emus and cassowaries -- are the opposite, with the females towering over the males.

Moa were huge flightless ratites. Several different species inhabited New Zealand's forests, grasslands and mountains until about 700 years ago. However, the first Polynesian settlers became a moa-hunting culture, and rapidly drove all of these species to extinction.

Dr Samuel Turvey, ZSL Senior Research Fellow and lead author on the paper, says: "We compared patterns of body mass within an evolutionary framework for both extinct and living ratites. Females becoming much larger was an odd side-effect of the scaling up of overall body size in moa.

Continued: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130409211939.htm