Ancient legends tell about feathered predators who turned the surroundings of the ancient Greek city of Stymphala almost into a desert. They were harpies. They attacked people and animals and tore them apart with their copper claws and beaks. They were destroyed by Hercules, the mighty son of Zeus and Alcmene. Only he could do such a feat.
Centuries have passed since the people in the valleys of Hellas laid down heroic legends about the exploits of Hercules. Tireless laborers of science, paleontologists, have unearthed ancient layers of the earth. How surprised the researchers were when they stumbled into the ground on the petrified skulls of birds of prey, weighing and not inferior in size to those of a horse!
But these fossil harpies lived not in Greece, but in North America, and not 2.5 thousand, but 50 million years ago (in the Neogene). Paleontologists have called them diatrims. The wings of this bird were underdeveloped, and the diatrim could not fly. But she ran very fast.
The diatrima is two meters tall, and its predatory beak, massive and long (almost half a meter in size!), Resembled a guillotine knife. With this terrible weapon, a monstrous bird could rip open the belly of any predator.
Were not the diatrim's beaks also designed to pierce the shells of dinosaurs, with which the ancestors of these birds apparently fought? In any case, the beak is clearly “armor-piercing”.
Millions of years ago, Antarctica had a fairly tolerable climate. Other giant birds, fororakos, have bred there, which penetrated the American continent: 45-35 million years ago, they already met in Patagonia.
Fororakos, like the diatrim, have a huge predatory beak and underdeveloped wings. Perhaps at that time in Patagonia the ancestors of the gigantic armadillos - glyptodonts - already lived. Glyptodonts, panochthuses, deedicurus are peaceful, herbivorous giants as tall as a small tank. Their body was protected by a powerful bone shell. The thickness of the armor reached 4.5 centimeters! The weapon of attack "live tank" served as a tail with a mace at the end, studded with sharp spikes.
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Maybe the ancient armadillos hid in their ossified skin from the terrible beaks of monstrous birds? It is possible that the Fororakos hunted the most ancient of the battleships in the Patagonian pampas. Thus, they, along with other predators, of course, contributed to the formation of a powerful protective shell in these animals.
Fororakos and diatrims did not pillage for long in the American plains. They disappeared as suddenly as they appeared.
Which Hercules exterminated these harpies?
Science does not yet know a satisfactory explanation for the reasons for their death.
Two more "birds", even larger than the diatrim and fororakos, lived on Earth. And now they died out. In times, however, later than birds with "armor-piercing" beaks. These are epiornis and moa. Both, fortunately, were not predatory. They fed on plants and various small animals. However, with a kick, they could immediately send a person to the next world.
The monstrous bird of Arabian tales was born in Madagascar. It was here, in the forests of this island, that giant birds were found, which could serve as a prototype for the fabulous bird Rukh.
Sinbad the Sailor, the hero of the Arabian tales "A Thousand and One Nights", has seen many different wonders. He saw monstrous snakes and monkeys, he met the bird Rukh on the way.
How huge this bird is! Rising into the air, it blocks the sun. In its claws, it can carry away an elephant or even a unicorn with three elephants strung on its horn!
On one of the southern islands, Sinbad the sailor found even an egg of the Rukh bird. Not an egg, but a whole mountain!
“… And suddenly something big and white flashed in front of me on the island,” says this eastern Munchausen. - And it turned out that it was a big white dome, going upward … I walked around the dome, measuring its circumference, and it was 50 full steps.
… And suddenly the sun disappeared and the air darkened, I was surprised, raised my head and saw a large bird with a huge body and wide wings, which flew through the air, and it covered my eye from the sun.
… The bird sank onto the dome and embraced it with its wings, and stretched its legs on the ground behind it, and fell asleep on it (glory be to the one who sleeps)."
Later, in the XIII century, the famous Venetian traveler Marco Polo dealt with the Rukh bird. On the map, compiled according to his descriptions, even the "Islands of the Rukh bird" are plotted.
Describing the fauna of Madagascar, Marco Polo says amazing things:
“There are different birds here, and they are completely different from ours, just a marvel!
… There is a vulture bird, and in everything the vulture is not the same as we think and depict it; we say that the vulture is half bird and half lion, and this is not true. Those who saw him say that he is just like an eagle, but only extremely large … The vulture is very strong and very large, will grab an elephant and carry it high, high into the air, and then throw it to the ground, and the elephant will be smashed: the vulture then bites it, eats and feeds on it. Anyone who has seen the vulture says that if he spreads his wings, then there are thirty steps in them, and the feathers in the wings are twelve steps, in length and thickness.
… About the vulture, one more thing needs to be said, they call him hand on the islands."
Further, Marco Polo tells how the Mongol Khan Kublai, whose guest he was, heard that a giant bird named Rukh lived far beyond the borders of the Tatar Empire. Khan sent loyal people to reconnaissance. They should have learned more about the outlandish bird. The messengers found the homeland of the Rukh bird - the island of Madagascar. The bird itself was not seen, but its feather was brought in ninety spans long! A span is an old Russian measure of length: the distance between the stretched thumb and forefinger. If so modestly put 23 centimeters in an inch, then 90 spans will be more than twenty meters! How they could carry it away, this curiosity!
Of course, there was a discrepancy with the "spans": the Venetian greatly exaggerated the dimensions of the "feather".
Modern researchers believe that the messengers brought not a bird's feather, but a leaf of the Madagascar palm tree Sagus ruffia. Its trunk is 15 meters high. From the top hang seven or eight giant leaves that look like bird feathers.
The habitat of the fabulous bird Rukhkh was indicated exactly by the khan's messengers. We will visit Madagascar and look for a legendary bird in its forests.
Zoologists of past centuries have made this journey. For the first time, Europeans learned not about fabulous, but living giant birds - vorompaters from the essay of the French admiral Flacour "The History of the Big Island of Madagascar". It was published in the middle of the 17th century. But only two hundred years later, the eggs and bones of the vorompatra were mined.
In 1832, the French naturalist V. Sganzen found in Madagascar the shell of a huge egg, six times larger than an ostrich. Later, the inhabitants of Madagascar sailed to the islands of Mauritius (in the Mascarene archipelago) for rum. Instead of barrels, they brought with them the shells of gigantic eggs. Each of them fit 13 bottles of rum!
A lost world
Finally, the bones of a monstrous bird were also found: in 1851 they were brought to the Paris Museum. The French scientist I. Saint-Hilaire studied these bones and made a scientific description of the bird from them. He called her epyornis - "the tallest of all the tallest birds."
Here I must disappoint the reader somewhat. It turned out that the giant bird of Madagascar is nowhere near as huge as ancient legends tell about it. She could not carry the elephant in the claws, but she was not inferior to him in height. Saint-Hilaire believed that some aepyornis were up to five meters! But, apparently, he was wrong. However, three-meter epyornis were not uncommon. Three meters is the average height of an elephant. Such a bird weighed almost half a ton!
And if Saint-Hilaire was not mistaken, then Madagascar birds, along with giraffes, can be considered one of the tallest animals on Earth. Above elephants, above the fossil rhinoceros baluchitheria, the acknowledged record giant among mammals ever to live on land.
But, alas, Vorompatra did not know how to fly: instead of wings, she had only underdeveloped stumps, thick, massive legs and a small head on a snake's neck.
So, one Madagascar bird weighed a little less than a bull and laid eggs with a good barrel. They are sometimes found in the peat of the swamps of Madagascar. Each of them holds 9 liters or 184 chicken eggs! For fun, it was calculated that from one egg of epyornis it was possible to cook fried eggs for almost a hundred people, and two thousand people could be fed with eggs from one nest!
Until the middle of the last century, the inhabitants of Madagascar claimed that elephant birds live in the most desolate corners of the island. Back in 1860, missionaries allegedly heard the muffled cries of these mysterious birds from the forest swamps. Now Madagascar ostriches are all extinct. Is it now?
Some say they have recently become extinct. Other paleontologists consider such conversations frivolous. In their opinion, the last epyornis died several millennia ago. But all this considerable period in the peat bogs of the forests of Madagascar, time kept the eggs and bones of feathered giants. They also served as the basis for the legends about the vorompatra and the bird Rukh. It is easy, of course, to call on imagination for help, to imagine how great the bird was, which incubated eggs that could hold 13 bottles of rum!
It is remarkable that on the other side of the world, thousands of kilometers from Madagascar, on the islands of New Zealand, we also meet giant superbirds.
Since 1840, scientists have described from fossil remains about two dozen species of wingless New Zealand ostriches, here called moa. Some of them were as tall as a sandpiper, others with their colossal forms competed with … elephants. After all, some moas reached a height of almost four meters! Such a bird weighed like a good horse - 300 kilograms!
In 1839, the first bone of a giant bird was found. At first they thought it was a bull's leg. The find was brought to England, and here the paleontologist R. Owen proved that the bone belongs to a monstrous bird. Owen devoted forty-five years of his life to the study of giant birds. For three years, from 1847 to 1850, naturalist W. Mantell, a tireless researcher of outlandish New Zealand animals, collected for him more than a thousand moa bones and many eggshells the size of a bucket. Owen studied these bones and shells. He described many different types of moa and made several skeletons of giant birds for museums.
Even now, in New Zealand, they find perfectly preserved skeletons of moa, and sometimes deposits of giant bones, like the cemeteries of some fabulous giants. Near the bones there are usually heaps of round pebbles, polished by rubbing against each other. Like our chickens, moa picked up pebbles on the ground and swallowed them. In the stomach, these small "millstones" were grinding the grains. In New Zealand, not only moa bones are found, but also their feathers with pieces of muscle, skin and tendons. Even eggs with embryos!
In the last century, from time to time there were reports from eyewitnesses who saw with their own eyes supposedly living moa.
It was said, for example, that the seal hunters camped on the Middle Island (in the Cook Strait separating the North and South Islands of New Zealand) were once frightened by monstrous birds four to five meters high, which ran out of the forest to the shore.
Another time, already in 1860, officials marking land plots noticed one morning the paw prints of a huge bird. The length of the track is 36 centimeters, and the width is 27. The tracks were lost in the thickets between the rocks. There are many limestone caves in this area. It is in them, the surveyors decided, that the last moa are hiding.
That is why some optimistic zoologists have not yet abandoned the hope of finding living giant birds in the mountain forests of New Zealand. But so far all efforts have come to nothing. Traces of moa should now be sought not in the forest thickets, but in the ground: these birds have died out.
True, they became extinct quite recently. Some old Maori people say that they took part in the hunt for moa in their youth. The Maori still have memories of those fabulous times when partridges were as tall as a horse. It is said that one surviving moa is hiding on Mount Bakapunaka. The bird feeds only on air, and it is guarded by two huge lizards. It is a pity that this is only a legend.
Akimushkin Igor. A lost world