Emeus
a.k.a. Eastern Moa
Name: Emeus.
Phonetic: E-me-us.
Named By: Ludwig Reichenbach - 1852.
Synonyms: Dinornis crassus, Dinornis
casuarinus, Dinornis huttonii, Dinornis major, Dinornis rheides,
Emeus casuarinus, Emeus huttonii, Meionornis, Mesopteryx,
Syornis.
Classification: Chordata, Aves, Paleognathae,
Struthioniformes, Dinornithidae.
Species: E. crassus.
Diet: Herbivore.
Size: Largest individuals up to 1.8 meters tall.
Known locations: New Zealand, South Island.
Time period: Pleistocene to Holocene, extinct at
some point around 1400 - 1500 AD.
Fossil representation: Many individuals, including
remnants of soft tissue and feathers.
Emeus
was originally named as a species of Dinornis,
D. crassus, by
Richard Owen in 1846, but ten years later the ornithologist Ludwig
Reichenbach elevated this species to its own genus. Almost this exact
sequence of events happened with another moa
genus named Anomalopteryx.
Also
known as the Eastern Moa, Emeus was very much
like its larger
relative Dinornis, however, while Dinornis
is accepted to have been
a reddish brown in its feather colour, the feathers on Emeus
were
more of a beige colour. The feathers on both Emeus
and Dinornis
however had devolved into more primitive hair-like structures,
presumably for insulation and rain-proofing within the forest habitats
that they commonly frequented. Also like with Dinornis,
the
hair-like feathers of Emeus were longest upon the
body, gradually
growing shorter as they rose up the neck, until they reached a
perhaps bald head.
One
of the stand out features of Emeus are the large
broad feet. Why the
feet of Emeus were larger is unknown for
certain, but larger feet
means a larger surface weight bearing area, which means a lower
ground pressure. What this all comes down to is that Emeus
would have
been better able to walk across soft ground without its feet sticking
in as much as those of smaller footed genera which would have had a
higher ground pressure. The principal is the same as wearing snow
shoes to stop you sinking in to snow as you walk, though for Emeus
a
more likely scenario could be walking along muddy embankments to lakes
and rivers. With all this said, the larger feet may simply be a
species selective characteristic and nothing more.
As
with all moa, the females of Emeus were larger
than the males,
though not quite to the same extent. Available fossils of female
Emeus indicate that at most they were about
twenty-five per cent as
large as the males. This is quite small when you consider that female
Dinornis could be as much as fifty per cent larger
than males, and
female Euryapteryx could be up to one hundred per
cent larger than the
males of their species.
Further reading
- Description of Dinornis crassus -
Proceedings of the Zoological
Society of London 1846: 46 - Richard Owen - 1846.
- Avium systema naturale - Expedition der vollst�ndigsten
Naturgeschichte - Ludwig Reichenbach - 1852.
- Nuclear DNA sequences detect species limits in ancient moa -
Nature 425 (6954): 175–178 - Leon J. Huynen, Craig
D. Millar, R. P. Scofield & David M. lambert -
2003.
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