This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

Extinction. When species go by by forever, we usually blame things like climate change, volcanic

eruption, or asteroid impact, but for the giant flightless birds that once

roamed the Australian outback, it was an omelet station what did him in.

A new study finds evidence that about 47,000 years ago,

humans helped to wipe out this avian Leviathan

by collecting and cooking its eggs.

The study is in the journal Nature Communications.

Before humans swept over the land down under,

animals of enormous proportions were not uncommon,

a two-ton wombat, a thousand pound kangaroo, and a 500-pound bird, now known

as Genurenes Newtoni, were spread across the continent.

But most of these so-called megafauna disappeared once humans hit the scene.

Coincidence?

Well, it could be, which is why researchers set out to look for proof that human predation

played a role in the demise of geniorness, which only coincidentally sounds like

gynormous.

They collected egg shells from hundreds of sites around the country, and they found that the

shell fragments exhibited scorch marks that suggested that the eggs had been purposefully

cooked over an open flame, marks that were not consistent with the eggs getting, say, burned up in a

wildfire.

Three different dating methods put the eggs age in the correct era,

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