Maori legends told of a giant predatory bird called the Te Hokioi, whose wingspan approached the length of a full-grown man and whose prey included human beings. Now Kiwi scientists are adding to the legend by claiming that a skeleton found in the 1870s shares some of the legendary bird’s traits.

“We don’t think it carried off men and women but it could well have carried off children,” says Paul Scofield, who along with colleagues at the Canterbury Museum in Christchurch published a report in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology indicating that the extinct Harpagornis moorei swiftly evolved wings 3 metres across and weighed in at 18 kilograms, twice the size of today’s largest living eagle, soon after its arrival on New Zealand’s South Island.

The team’s bone scans revealed that the bird’s pelvis may have been strong enough to hit its prey at up to 80 kilometres per hour with talons the size of a tiger’s (ABC News). Scofield told The Independent that the Haast’s eagle, named after its 19th-century discoverer, “wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird. It was the equivalent of a lion.” In addition to picking off the odd child, the bird probably lived mostly on flightless moa birds, which grew as large as 250 kg and 2.5 metres tall.

The title of the research article suggests that more cerebral matters may have driven the scientists (“Rapid somatic expansion causes the brain to lag behind: the case of the brain and behavior of New Zealand’s Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei)”) but the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology press release did not link to the original article, nor was it available today on the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology’s website.

Haast’s eagle “must be one of the most dramatic examples anywhere of how rapidly evolution can occur on islands,” Jamie R. Wood told the Associated Press. But perhaps it was not fast enough, since researchers believe the birds went extinct 500 years ago, about 250 years after the arrival of humans on New Zealand’s South Island.

UPDATE: The article is now available to subscribers or for purchase from the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology: here.

Photo: CT scans of Harpagornis moorei skull. Dr. Ken W.S. Ashwell and Christchurch Radiology