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ek slash special offer. This is Scientific American 60 second science I'm

Christopher in Tagyatta.

New Zealand once had a Dr. Seuss-worthy assortment of birds.

Take the giant Moa, a flightless bird twice as tall as an adult human

which weighed more than a sumo wrestler. Then there was the

Hast's Eagle, the largest eagle ever known to exist. It hunted the moa. But as the

story often goes, then came humans. First the Maori about 700 years ago,

and then European colonists a couple hundred years ago.

In both sets of people drove many of New Zealand's unique birds to extinction,

and many of the surviving species today are now threatened or endangered.

So you have species like the kiwi, the kakapo, kia, the kaka, the takahai, all with nice

mowry names but all in danger of going extinct.

Louis Valente, an evolutionary biologist at the Natural History Museum of Berlin.

...