New giant bird species identified 17 years after discovery

For years, a fossil leg bone lay in Liang Bua cave on Indonesia’s Flores Island. The cave is famous for the discovery of Homo floresiensis, a small human relative nicknamed the ‘hobbit’.

Although researchers identified it as a bird bone, they set it aside, as studies at the time focused more on mammal remains.Now, almost 17 years later, researchers have taken a second look at the fossil. They have identified it as belonging to a new, extinct species of megapode.

The ground-dwelling, chicken-like bird is the first megapode fossil ever found in Wallacea. It is also one of the largest of its kind, according to the study published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology."It is one of the oldest bird remains we have found at Liang Bua …," Hanneke Meijer, a professor and curator of osteology at the University Museum of Bergen, said in a statement.