Legends of huge, terrifying, man-eating birds have been passed down from one Maori generation to the next for centuries. Until now, it was thought that they were just that: legends. But recent scientific evidence suggests that the scary birds depicted in rock drawings may have been Haast’s eagle, a very real bird that went extinct about 500 years ago. Because of New Zealand’s physical isolation, it has no indigenous large mammals, so birds often filled in the roles in the ecosystem normally taken up by large mammals. Haast’s eagle was huge, powerful, and built for killing – just like a lion.

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