Mark Fujita, age 11, of Scarborough, Ontario, Canada, for his question:

Is there really an elephant bird?

There was a whopping elephant bird, but not within living memory. Like the giant moa bircl he became extinct many centuries ago. Perhaps he grew too big to survive as a bird in the balance of nature. The subtle laws of nature permit and even encourage animals to change with the times. But there seem to be limits in these laws. The dinosaurs were discarded when their teeming, diversified forms crowded out other developing species. Perhaps the elephant bird was discarded when he surpassed the size limit permitted in the bird world.

In the 1200s, Marco Polo reported that the Great Khan of China was presented with some giant plumes from a fabulous bird called the Roc. Piany fanciful tales were told of this elephant sized flying bird. Nobody took them very seriously until the mid 1800s, when traders returned from the small island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean. The sailors reported seeing an egg shell big enough to hold two gallons of water. The bird who laid such an enormous egg should be six times bigger than an ostrich. This report made some people suspect that maybe Marco Polo's astounding Roc really existed.

Scientists eventually unearthed the truth about the eggs and perhaps also traced the exaggerated legend of the Roc. They found the fossil remains of elephant birds, not on Mauritius, but on the nearby island of Madagascar. They were bulky non flying ratite birds, distantly related to the surviving ostriches and emus, the cassowaries and the extinct moas. Some 13 species have been identified and classified in the Family Aepyornithodae    meaning the Tall Birds.

The giant of the clan stood nine feet tall and weighed half a ton. Thick legs supported his enormous hind quarters but his wings were hardly worth mentioning. Unlike the fabulous Roc, the real live elephant bird never flew through the air. Most of his fossil bones have been unearthed in brush and forested regions of the island. But apparently the females went down to the sand dunes to bury their eggs. The shell of the giant elephant bird was big enough to hold the contents of six ostrich eggs  ¬of 144 hen eggs, or 30,000 little humming bird eggs. It is estimated that it weighed 18 pounds. Once hatched, the elephant bird went on to grow up and become the biggest bird known to have ever lived on the earth. Other species of the tall family were the size of ostriches.

The family tree of the elephant bird dates back to the Eocene Period of SO million years ago. As far as we know, they thrived only on the sheltered island of Madagascar. Some experts suspect that nature discarded them about 5,000 years ago. Others think that they survived until the 1300s and that the last of these giants were wiped out by early human settlers on the island. At any rate, the whopping elephant bird and all his kinfolk have been extinct for many centuries.