Jan 27 2008
Demon Duck of Doom
Mihirung paringmal is an Aboriginal word from the Tjapwuring people of Western Victoria and it means ‘giant bird’.
Giant Demon Duck of Doom
Commonly known as Stirton’s Thunder Bird, this huge flightless bird lived in subtropical open woodlands in the late Miocene. (8 - 6 million years ago). This was the largest of a group of flightless birds found only in Australia.
Their closest relatives may have been waterfowl. This is why Stirton’s Thunder Bird has been nicknamed the ‘Giant Demon Duck of Doom’.
The Dromornis stirtoni was a flightless bird that weighed over 500 kilos and stood nearly 3 metres tall, indeed the biggest bird that ever lived, bigger than the Giant Moa of New Zealand and the largest Elephant Bird (an extinct group of giant birds from Madagascar).
They were part of a family of giant birds called Dromornithidae that lived from 15 million years ago until less than 30,000 years ago.
Some of its bones are enormous. A toe bone is 10 times the size of a human finger. The jawbone is described as big enough to play tennis with. I don’t know about a tennis match, but a dromornis must surely have fed a large family for a week.
(Certain varieties of the Dromornis stirtoni lived up to about 50,000 years ago, when Australia was inhabited.)
Extinction of Megafauna
Megafauna roamed and ruled the planet once, and Australia had its own, often in the form of giant marsupials. Most megafauna became extinct during the Pleistocene, 20,000 -50,000 years before the present.
The cause of the extinction is still being debated.
One theory states that climate change brought the megafauna to an end. Australia has experienced numerous climatic oscillations over the last 2 million years, some more extreme than the most recent glacial period, but the fact that the megafauna survived all of these earlier oscillations in climate has contributed to another theory.
The Aboriginal people arrived here about 60 thousand years ago, and these earlier peoples used fire as a tool for changing landscapes as well as for driving prey while hunting. Did this signal the end of the last megafauna?
It can’t be denied that wherever humanity has spread, there have been drastic reductions in the populations of other animals, and our appearance has coincided with the disappearance of whole species.
Like to shout me a cold beer?
