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Results for Tongoenas burleyi

Friday 24 July 2020

Gainesville-Florida, USA
A large fruit-eating bird from Tonga joins the dodo in the line-up of giant island pigeons hunted to extinction. New research into fossils shows that ‘Tongoenas burleyi’, a newly described genus and species, inhabited the Pacific islands for at least 60,000 years, but vanished within a century or two of human arrival around 2,850 years ago. The size of a large duck, ‘T. burleyi’ was likely capable of swallowing fruit as big as a tennis ball, said study lead author David Steadman.