The aepyornis was a huge bird that was 10 feet tall and weighed in at around 1000 lbs. We will never know for sure what these birds looked like as there are very few descriptions available and no drawings. Their fossils have given us some insight to what they might have looked like and there have been several drawings created of what they may have looked like.

They are the largest know bird to have lived on earth; and belong to the family of flightless birds called ratite. Like most other ratites, the elephant birds' breast bone had no keel. The keel anchors the strong muscles attached to the wings that other birds have that allows them to fly. Their forelimbs were modified wings.

Aepyornis were stout birds and very robust with a dinosaur like body. They had short, thick legs and large feet. The four-toed feet of the elephant bird indicate that were much more suited to stomping through dense forests than anywhere else. They had big heads and necks.

Native's history describes the aepyornis as a non-aggressive bird and it is portrayed as a shy, peaceful bird in their writings. The birds were grazers that fed on leaves from trees with no natural predators.

(Picture is from an article in the New Humanist by Richard Dawkins ... http://www.newhumanist.org.uk/volume119issue5_comments.php?id=P948_0_32_0_C)

Aepyornis is special in that they laid the largest eggs known. Their eggs were even larger than the largest ones laid by dinosaurs. The eggs that have been found were up to three feet in circumference and 13-inches long. Scientists have calculated that the eggs were as large as they could be and still be functional. They were the largest single cells to ever have existed.

Fossil hunters have found many of these eggs washed up on southern coastal sand dunes and peat deposits. The fossils found are often fragments of the egg, but occasionally they have found an entire egg with the bones of the embryos still inside (pictured here). The National Geographic Society in Washington has one on display. It was found by Luis Marden in 1967.

Size Comparisons: It would take 15 dozen chicken eggs to match the size of one aepyornis egg! Two gallons of milk would be needed to fill just one egg.

The elephant bird was native only to the African island of Madagascar. They came into being during the early Cenozoic Era and walked with the dinosaurs. When the end of the dinosaur era came it left room for the evolution of a new breed of animals known as the megafauna.

Only the largest type of the aepyornis is known to have co-existed with humans.

In 1658 Madagascar's first governor, Étienne de Flacourt, said of them, "Vouropatra-a large bird which haunts Ampatres and lays eggs like ostriches; so that the people of these places may not take it, it seeks the most lonely places."