How 1,200-year-old eggs from a 9-foot tall, 1,500-pound bird led to a scientific breakthrough

Towering over nine feet tall and weighing over 1,500 pounds, the aepyornis has a pointy beak and powerful talons.
Sometimes called "flightless giants," the birds lived more than 1,200 years ago and were deemed Madagascar’s largest land animals.
Scientists at the University of Colorado Boulder and Curtin University in Australia recently discovered a new lineage of the birds using eggshell remnants, as well as isotope geochemistry and protein extraction. The findings were published last month in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature Communications.
“This is the first time a taxonomic identification has been derived from an elephant bird eggshell and it opens up a field that nobody would have thought about before,” said co-author Gifford Miller from the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at CU Boulder in a press release.
The findings suggest there may have been more diversity among birds than scientists know about, he said.
How 1,200-year-old eggs from a 9-foot tall, 1,500-pound bird led to a scientific breakthrough