Gigantic Goose Found Down Under

Left: Dromornis Stirtoni - very big and very scary.
© Dr.P. Murray, Museum of Central Australia.

Imagine you're an Australian Aborigine, thousands of years ago, and you're wandering through the forest looking for a bite to eat.

The sun's shining and you can hear water rushing over the pebbles in the nearby stream. What a peaceful thought.

But hold on …. what's that crashing through the trees? It sounds huge, it sounds fast, what could it possibly be? It's three metres tall and looks pretty mean - it's as tall as an elephant - it's a gigantic goose!

Strange as that may seem, palaeontologists in Australia have found fossils of a giant goose weighing up to half a tonne.

To give you an idea of how big that is, if you put twenty seven-year-old boys on some huge scales, all together, they would weigh about half a tonne. That's heavy.

The fossils were found at Alcoota, in the Australian desert. The palaeontologists from the Museum of Central Australia, who have been piecing together the remains, believe these ones are eight million years old.

They think that the birds would have lived there until about thirty thousand years ago. Aboriginal people would have been around then too.

Left: Skeleton of giant goose.
© Museum of Central Australia.

The land where the geese would have lived is desert now but millions of years ago there would have been forests, water and grass.

The gigantic flightless geese had huge, strong beaks, but until more of their skulls are found, the experts can't tell exactly what they would have eaten.

Do they sound like vegetarians or meat eaters to you? Whatever they ate, I doubt the Aborigines would have wanted to run into them.

Giant geese weren't the only enormous animals or birds around in Australia at the time; take a look at the Megadig section of Discovernet to find out more.