Happy Nice Mall

At Craigmore Station in Canterbury, New Zealand, an old Maori painting graces the limestone ledge of a cave. The painted bird of prey, thought to depict an extinct eagle, gives the cave its name: Te Ana Pouakai, or Eagle’s Cave. But it wasn’t just any bird – it could be a Haast’s eagle, with a wingspan of between six and 10 feet, making the species the largest known eagle ever.

The Maori artist painted the bird with a black body and outlines of a head and neck, resembling a vulture’s bald head more than an eagle’s feathered dome.

Now, a group of scientists proposes that the extinct eagle looked just like its painted form. The group created 3D models of the extinct bird’s skull, beak and claws, testing how well the eagle performed against living raptors in a series of feeding simulations. Their results were published Wednesday in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society BClaim that the Haast eagle hunts like a predatory eagle but feasts like a scavenger vulture.

“It’s a unique, chimera-like combination for a bird,” said study author Stephen Wroe of the University of New England in Armidale, Australia.

Haast’s eagle, its prey, the flightless moa, perished around 1400. hunted to extinction by Maori settlers. Eagles were huge and weighed 30 pounds. In Maori knowledge, Haast’s eagle may have been represented as: pouakaiA giant bird of prey that can kill and eat humans.

Although eagles were first described in the late 19th century, the question of whether the creature was a hunter or a scavenger remained unsolved for decades. Recent analyzes of the eagle’s nervous system and sensitive, powerful talons have provided compelling evidence that the great bird killed its prey like modern eagles.

“Modern eagles eat things smaller than themselves, so they can eat in two or three bites,” said study author Anneke van Heteren of the Bavarian State Zoological Collection in Munich and author of the paper.

But many scientists have noted the vulture-like features of the Haast eagle, such as the bony structures around its nostrils, which help scavengers to feed inside a much larger animal without accidentally suffocating themselves.

Dr. “When they get their heads in the glue, they don’t want to get it up their noses,” van Heteren said. Dr. Wroe had received CT scans of a Haast’s eagle skull nearly a decade ago. But studies of the animal’s potentially vulture-like traits suggest that Dr. It remained in the background for years until van Heteren took it.

To capture the shape of the skull, beak and claws of Haast’s eagle in three dimensions, the researchers used a technique called geometric morphometry, which describes landmarks on bone.

Just as eagles can specialize in hunting a particular prey, vultures are not all. to sweep same way. Some, known as “predators,” feed on the tough skin of a carcass. “Gülpers” furiously absorb the soft, nutrient-rich intestines. And the “scrapers” eat small scraps.

The authors compared Haast eagle models with living vulture and eagle models, which display a variety of diets from hunting to scavenging. they examined black vulture, a “predator” and Andean vulture, a “gulper” and several eagles hunting prey of various sizes. The researchers ran the models through simulations of feeding behavior.

Dr. “Vultures feed on animals much larger than themselves,” Wroe said. “They have to insert their heads into the abdominal cavity of a decomposing zebra carcass and remove the soft internal organs of high nutritional value: heart, lungs, liver.”

Haast’s eagle model performed like a vulture in some tests and eagle-like in others. It had the claws of an eagle and was excellent at biting its prey. But he wasn’t that good at tearing off pieces of meat. Feeding like a vulture, it was very similar to the swallowing Andean condor, with its ability to stick its nose into carrion.

These results suggest that the Haast eagle killed the moa and then ate its guts, the researchers say. Dr. “That’s not a bad feat, because it was such a large bird,” Wroe said of the moa, which can weigh up to 550 pounds.

Guillermo Navalón, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge who was not involved in the study, said the authors found that they found strong evidence for the hunting prowess of Haast’s eagle.

But he said the similarity in skull shape between the Haast eagle and vultures may be a result of their similarly sized size, not an indicator of their feeding behavior. 2016 study He found that larger raptors have different skull shapes than smaller raptors. Dr. Navalón suggested that a more thorough analysis of skull shapes could clarify whether the similarities were related to scavenging rather than just the size of the birds.

When the article was almost finished, one of the authors wondered if the Haast eagle was bald like many modern vultures. Dr. van Heteren thought: scientific accuracy European cave art and researchers scoured the internet for drawings of the Haast eagle in New Zealand caves.

While researching, they stumbled upon a photograph of Eagle’s Cave’s painted ledge, depicting a dark bird with an unpainted head – perhaps evidence of baldness.

Dr. “I don’t know what else it could be when you look at it,” van Heteren said. “These people were eyewitnesses, why don’t you take their word for it?”