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Maori Legend of Man-Eating Birds is True
jerryatrix writes "Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand. From the article, 'Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast's eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago.'"
So it wasn't the dingo, after all.
No word on the part of the legend where they also had giant lasers...
Dingos were australian. Wrong country I'm afraid :P
The Maori didn't mess around with animals they didn't like. They killed off the Moa too.
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I lived in New Zealand for awhile and it's shocking the number of flightless birds that died out. The final death blow to some species was the introduction of rats. They ate the eggs of birds and wiped out many species of Weta Bugs. New Zealand missed out on the mega Fauna extinction their's happened in the last 2,000 years instead of 10,000 to 15,000 years ago. Modern science just missed out on a lot of species. Hard to believe how different the world was 20,000 years ago, 500 years ago was nothing. It was only a few lifetimes before Europeans set foot in New Zealand.
Gentlemen, start your cloning!
Now this is big bird.
He was a Colonel and even had millions of people helping him.
rewriting history since 2109
The eagles are coming! The eagles are coming!
And you thought that was CG!
I'm just glad there weren't any environmentalists trying to save this bird, 500 years ago.
... maybe there were a few (tasty) ones...
Then again
The primary reason that they went extinct was due to a loss of food. The Maori hunted all of the moa species of bird (large and flightless) to extinction. Another prime example of natives living "in tune" with nature...
Some species of Terror Bird would chase down their prey and literally peck it to death. They had an interesting feature about these things on Discovery last night; with this story it just seemed appropriate to mention it.
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A legend of a man... eating birds?
What's next? Some kind of ...fried chicken?
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So - just maybe - the Roc may also have existed???
It became extinct fairly recently, why don't we clone it? Surely these things will make a great addition to the New Zealand Air Defense Force.
Who was the smart arse that tagged this 'australia'?
It would be cool if it was alive today...
I mean, it's not as if that's the only creature that could singlehandedly overpower a human, even the only one that could swallow us whole. Should we have killed all the lions, tigers, and bears?
I would love to have seen one of these in a zoo.
Of course, the fact that they're gone means we can actually go to New Zealand safely...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
New Zealand has two military intelligence bases, Waihopi and the other I forget the name of, both of which are apart of the ECHELON Network. New Zealand 'Peace Keepers' are situated in Timor Leste, were involved in Bougainvillea (both small Pacific islands) and are in various other Pacific nations right now. New Zealand followed ' lead into South Africa in the Boer Wars, even conquered German Samoa at the start of World War One (we literally had a Prime Minister with an Imperialist vision for New Zealand at one point), went to Africa and and Europe during WWI (the famous words about Britain 'Where she goes, we go') and by a quirk of our time zones, New Zealand was the first to declare war on Germany. We fought in Europe again during WWII, and we protected the Pacific from the Japanese threat. In the fifties, we sent the K-Force into Korea, and troops got involved in the Malay Conflict (as 'military advisor's' of course). I have a second-cousin once removed that was killed fighting in Vietnam in the NZ Contingent, though our force over there was a token. And up until 2006 the S.A.S. were in Afghanistan, and rumoured to have done over the border trips into Iraq. They've just been given the go ahead for redeployment.
In short, do your research man.
Funnily enough, I believe it was due to the warrior culture of the Maori that the white immigrants were able to peacefully (well, more peaceful then us aussies did with the aboriginals) co-exist. From what I've heard (which is only a very little bit), the maori tribes were too busy fighting each other to pay much attention to the white immigrants and that they even allied with the white immigrants to help them in their fights with the other tribes.
Had they been slightly more peaceful, they might have united against the immigrants and successfully driven them off. As it was, they mostly just ignored the immigrants because they were too busy fighting each other.
At least, that's what I've been told. I might have got it COMPLETELY wrong ;)
Yup,...it'd be a pretty Odd man that eats a Maori. Pretty tough buggers those. :-) A bit of a step up from Pit Bull I tell you!
Yeah I also understood they did better than us because of the Maori being fighters - but more because the arriving whiteys realised they couldn't just walk all over the natives and had better cut some deals. In Australia we just hunted them down, poisoned their flour, etc etc
So, while NZ may no longer be looking to go to war, back the F' up if they ever do.
The same can be said from all of England's colonies/conquests. The ANZACs surely earned their reputation in both world wars, but would you discount the role played by the Gurkhas, Canadians, or even the Scots? When you heard bagpipes, saw turbans, or heard "eh" or "no worries" on the battlefield, it was time to run...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Is there any chance of getting some DNA, cloning a few of these dudes, so that we can set them loose in the cities? I can see the population problem slowly improving. I can see the gene pool improving, at the same time. This idea has promise.....
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There's an amazing video of the native bat running, because it'd evolved to be flightless like the birds.
Video
Shame on you for talking up something so cool and not providing a link.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller's sea eagle.
So it's late and I don't have my trusty TI-89, can anyone calculate the maximum airspeed of this beast? ... Unladen of course =)
I can't see it being a problem really, unless there is an African variant....
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1) At no point in time did I doubt NZ's abilities or say that they have not made very valuable contributions in the past. Quite the opposite.
2) That said I was not aware of the Afghan SAS. I had assumed Helen Clark had put an end any "foreign adventures"
I was once stationed at 'the other I forget the name of'. We went into town on a weekend pass and had the hardest time finding a taxi driver that knew the way back. Ended up it was just over the hill from 'some city I can't recall just now'.
So, aside from the sheep-eating lizards . . .
. . . well I'm hoping the sheep eating lizards found more than just evidence of 'land animals' else they would soon become 'fuck, where's the sheep?' lizards. Admittedly they sound dangerous too . . .
I've experience the very same thing in the Caribbean. I wonder if it's a conspiracy.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
So, the questions begin...
Man tastes like chicken, or was this just fowl 69-action pr0n?
Excuse me while I bleach my brain.
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I think, from what I've read somewhere, that another reason the Maoris didn't come off as badly as some of the other indigenous people the British came across is that they were excellent fighters. Since they did spend most of their spare time fighting each other they had had a lot of practice when it came to fighting the British.
Despite the fact the colonists had naval guns and firearms the Maoris were able to devise tactics which completely negated the advantage they would have otherwise provided and dealt out a couple of fairly comprehensive beatings to the colonists so much so that during WWI the British actually recruited Maori elders to advise them how to conduct effective trench warfare.
And up until 2006 the S.A.S. were in Afghanistan, and rumoured to have done over the border trips into Iraq
NZ occupies Iran?????
Since when was Scotland a colony or a conquest of England's?? ;-)
My grandfather fought in 5 WW2 campaigns. Whilst lined up waiting to be evacuated (australians, scots, canadians, I think greek) from *somewhere* via a beach, British redcap's on horseback arrived and announced that all the colonial troops would have to stand aside while the British troops were evacuated first.
The battle hardened Australian troops responded by killing all 12 MP's, queue jumping is disliked to this day in Australia.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"giant man-eating birds... a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago."
I guess it means that finally men won...
Yes, like always: big predator hunting homo sapiens means that the predator is on the fastlane to extinction....Except if it can retreat to a territory where human population is non-existent or very sparse (like polar bear for example), it is doomed....
Not really quite the case. Maori and the British fought tooth and nail for most of the 19th century. In fact, some British officers wanted nothing more than to completely wipe Maori off the face of the planet, and in some areas pretty much succeeded.
NZ's history as far as the colony is concerned is far from peaceful. Maori didn't stop fighting each other, maybe. But they didn't just ignore the British either. They used the British technology against each other, and also against the British.
The major issue with the Treaty of Waitangi is that the Maori version and the English version are not identical. The translations were pretty rough. So even after it was signed by all the tribal leaders across the country, there are still disputes going on between the Crown and many of the Maori tribes today. The only difference is that the weapon of choice is now money and land. Or the expenditure of former, and prolonged occupation of the latter.
http://www.newzealandwars.co.nz/ is a good place to find out about the wars that raged in the 19th century.
On and off from 1066 to 1745.
You should start your research here.
The battle hardened Australian troops responded by killing all 12 MP's They killed 12 Members of Parliament?
You wish.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
And up until 2006 the S.A.S. were in Afghanistan, and rumoured to have done over the border trips into Iraq.
Afghanistan has no border with Iraq.
That is, unless you assume that as true New Zealanders the SAS are descended from birds.
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SAS looks like some kind of acronym. I wonder what the A stands for.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Of course Raul was elected, by 100% of eligible Cuban voters - aka Fidel Castro.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
"But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology ... showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph."
So... How exactly did this bird kill?
This is a good demonstration of the importance of good punctuation; of course, when they said "man eating bird", what they mean was not "a bird that eats people", but "a man who eats a bird". See, it all much clearer now.
My grandfather fought in 5 WW2 campaigns. Whilst lined up waiting to be evacuated (australians, scots, canadians, I think greek) from *somewhere* via a beach, British redcap's on horseback arrived and announced that all the colonial troops would have to stand aside while the British troops were evacuated first.
The battle hardened Australian troops responded by killing all 12 MP's, queue jumping is disliked to this day in Australia.
Nothing is worse than when reality resembles a scene from a Mel Gibson film.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
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So - just maybe - the Roc may also have existed???
Do you think one of those could carry a baby elephant?
You can't take the sky from me...
Australia also has plenty of man-eating birds only there they call them Sheilas...
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Do the man-eating birds have large talons? N.D.
Not really, we were less hopeless than the Germans for example.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/04/2021228
http://www.mcmaster.ca/opr/html/opr/media/main/NewsReleases/2005/NR_bunce.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/wildfacts/factfiles/3044.shtml
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18524812.300-giant-eagle-evolved-in-record-time.html
I remember reading about this....in xmen i think,
no...where they go to antartica or something, and end up near Australia where they got the manbird dude...
Isnt this the next xmen movie?
"Legends of the New Zealand Maori tell of giant man-eating birds. New scientific evidence proves that these birds did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand.
If you are a giant man-eating bird, it's pretty much essential to be around at the same time as some humans.
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Never watched Braveheart obviously.
... Uh, I see your ";-)" now, I'll post anyway though.
How, exactly, did you think the various (non-English) parts of the United Kingdom became united under an English monarch?
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There are some ecologies where fire is essential to the overall health of the ecology. Tallgrass prairie, the home turf of the American bison, is one example. Lodgepole forests, the kind that burned in the 1988 Yellowstone fires, are another.
Now while Native Americans didn't have rifles or horses, they did a pretty good job of hunting buffalo through the use of fire and buffalo jumps. I would say that a lack of horses forced them to be a bit more careful about their environment, because of lack of transportation. That lack of transportation would also keep the population low.
There is a stuffed giant eagle suspended above a great moa in Te Papa Museum in Wellington. The caption for the eagle said that mothers had to watch for the eagles, as any baby left unattended could be carried away. If this is the same bird, then this is common knowledge.
So oral tradition gets kicked up a notch on the veracity scale because some big monkey-eating bird "actually existed"? Is the surprise the bird, or the fact that the Maoris got it right, or the obvious alacrity with which Westerners can stick two unrelated facts together with their private brand of crazy glue? I should probably read TFA but I'm not getting the tattoo, tyvm.
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I went to a fair once and saw a six foot man eating chicken.
True story.
IANAK (I am not a Kiwi.) but as I recall hearing on our vacation there, NZ had the highest WW2 death toll as measured by percentage of population. Of course I have no citation for that though...
It was hard for me to type that: I'm half Scots, my mother and grandmother were born in Aberdeen, and I belong to the Stuart clan, I guess :)
But history is what history is... and at least I know that Scotch is a drink...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
> New scientific evidence proves that these [giant, man-eating] birds
> did exist and were around the same time as humans in New Zealand.
The article continues: Last Thursday one bird even went so far as to tell a reporter to get the f*** away and that he had "never even met Xena."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
My grandfather was very humble and I don't think the sickly type of heroism that is portrayed in many of these movies is quite right, I think it was more a case of desperation to survive. Like hiding under an old boat with his squad for three days in blazing heat because they came down the wrong ridge right into Italian forces and had to wait for them to pass. He survived all of WW2 so he must of been a decent soldier, but the war cost him three daughters which I think he never really got over decades later.
He was so appalled by the thought of killing after the war that even killing animals for food on the farm was impossible for him. I think he'd seen enough death.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Well it's good it's not just a slightly-larger-than-average Golden Eagle claw. http://storeforknowledge.com/Golden-Eagle-Claw-Replica-P8556C220.aspx A claw that is 1cm larger than a modern bird and it's a legendary giant man eating bird? Interesting.
NZ also has a fine counter-alien task force, the Astro Investigation and Defence Service, as shown in the Peter Jackson documentary, Bad Taste. They drove a Morris Minor.
Coyotes
Not always. Nice try though.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
SAS looks like some kind of acronym. I wonder what the A stands for.
SAS stands for Special Air Service.
Forget world peace, bring on -1 pointless
That's probably because the maoris actually invented trench warfare while fighting off the british.
http://www.doc.govt.nz/about-doc/news/media-releases/2008/early-maori-military-engineering-skills-to-be-honoured-by-new-zealand-professional-engineers/
Insanity: voting in the same two parties over and over again and expecting different results
So they can fly, right over your head?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There hasn't been an English Monarch since 1066.
Well, in the case of Scotland, because Elizabeth I didn't have any children and her closest surviving relative was... King James of Scotland, son of Mary Queen of Scots. So technically, the subsequent English kings (for a few generations, at least) were Scots, not the other way around.
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Just think: Hitchcock's 'The Birds' could have been a really scary movie, if he had used giant birds instead of normal-sized examples.
http://scienceblogs.com/tetrapodzoology/thunderbirds%20are%20go.jpg
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Yet once upon a time, it would seem, that we did . . .
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6. "The Commonwealth" shall mean the Commonwealth of Australia as established under this Act.
"The States" shall mean such of the colonies of New South Wales, New Zealand, Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria, Western Australia, and South Australia, including the northern territory of South Australia, as for the time being are parts of the Commonwealth, and such colonies or territories as may be admitted into or established by the Commonwealth as States; and each of such parts of the Commonwealth shall be called "a State".
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. . you can view a farmer with a big c0ck:
http://www.geocities.com/gabriel3d/manwithbigcock.html
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