The impressively large egg of a dwarf emu — a short and stocky bird that went extinct around 200 years ago — has been unearthed from a sand dune on an island between Australia and Tasmania, a new study finds.
The cracked and empty eggshell is missing a few pieces, but it's a "rare" and "unique" discovery, said study lead researcher Julian Hume, a paleontologist and research associate with the National History Museum, London. It's the only known nearly complete egg from King Island of Dromaius novaehollandiae minor, a dwarf emu that was roughly half the size of the Australian mainland emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae), the only surviving emu Down Under, he said.
The dwarf emu's egg is nearly the size of a regular emu's egg, perhaps because its chicks needed to be big enough to maintain body heat and strong enough to immediately forage for food after hatching, just like the kiwi does today, Hume said.
