This was no mass extinction (far from it) but targeted mega-fauna: if you don’t live in Africa, and you weigh over 30 kg (which the moa certainly did) then chances are you’re extinct (Martin and Klein 1989). That epoch carries a distinct pattern of extinction. I’m much less confident of whether Aotearoa’s example is projectable across the Pleistocene. Within a few centuries, the moa were gone (Allentoft 2014). Once humans turned up forests were burned, moa were stalked, and human-0introduced arrivals such as kiore (the Polynesian rat) had dramatic ecological repercussions. Stretching to three metres at their tallest, moa were a distinctive and remarkable feature of Aotearoa’s primeval forests, playing the main browser and grazer role in this unique bird-based ecosystem. Here’s something I’m willing to claim we know: Homo sapiens, in particular the Polynesian settlers who first arrived in Aotearoa (New Zealand) around the twelfth century, take the lion’s share of causal blame for the extinction of a lineage of enormous flightless birds: the moa.
