Sentences with phrase «moa species»

That's because bird genomes, including the eight other (all extinct) moa species, have similar structures.

To do that, Harvard's Alison Cloutier and the rest of the little bush moa team (which declined to talk about the work before its formal publication) took their 900 million nucleotides, scattered across millions of DNA pieces, and tried to match them to specific locations on the genome of the emu, a close relative of all nine moa species.

Morten Allentoft of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and colleagues studied DNA from 281 fossils of four moa species.

Not exact matches

New Zealand was home to nine species of flightless moa until humans arrived around AD 1300.

Taxonomists had long divided moas into two types, one of which, Dinornis, included three species: a 5 - foot - tall bird, a 3 - foot dwarf, and a 10 - foot - tall, 550 - pound «supermoa.»

This species, which scientists think evolved from lancewood, grows on the Chatham Islands 800 kilometers east of New Zealand, where moas didn't live.

For millions of years, nine species of large, flightless birds known as moas (Dinornithiformes) thrived in New Zealand.

Using ancient DNA from 281 individual moas from four different species, including Dinornis robustus (at 2 meters, the tallest moa, able to reach foliage 3.6 meters above the ground), and radiocarbon dating, Allentoft and his colleagues set out to determine the moas» genetic and population history over the last 4000 years.

The moas present a particularly interesting case, researchers say, because they were the last of the giant species to vanish, and they did so recently, when a changing climate was no longer a factor.

Humans have driven thousands of species extinct over the millennia, ranging from moas — giant, flightless birds that lived in New Zealand — to most lemurs in Madagascar.

Scientists have long argued about what caused the extinction of many species of megafauna — giant animals including mammoths, mastodons, and moas — beginning between 9000 and 13,000 years ago, when humans began to spread around the world.

In isolation, New Zealand bloomed into a biome of species known nowhere else in the world, including the Moa: huge, flightless birds hunted to extinction by the early peoples.

Cats, after all, will never manage to make a bird species extinct, but humans have done so many times already (moa, dodo, etc.).

Though many species — such as the moa, a giant flightless bird, and the Haast's eagle, with its impressive 10 - foot wing span — have gone extinct since European settlers arrived, countless others remain, such as the kakapo, the world's heaviest parrot (which is also flightless) and the tuatara, a reptile that was a contemporary of the dinosaurs and is now the last of its kind.