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Animal profile
Aepyornis maximus
Elephant birds were enormous flightless ratites endemic to Madagascar, the heaviest birds known. They laid eggs of extraordinary size, fragments of which still wash out of coastal dunes. Several genera are recognised, and all were gone before European settlement of the island.
An elephant bird egg could hold about thirty centimetres of length and a volume of roughly eight to nine litres, more than a hundred chicken eggs and larger than any dinosaur egg yet found. Intact shells still turn up in Madagascar's coastal dunes.
Madagascar's elephant birds weighed several hundred kilograms. Ancient DNA showed their nearest living relatives are not the ostriches of nearby Africa but New Zealand's kiwi, small nocturnal birds on the far side of the Indian Ocean.