Megafauna Birds

A long, long time ago, in the time of the Pleistocene era, the area we know as Greater Melbourne was a vast grassland, with patches of open woodland. On this grassland lived many different creatures, from giant monitor lizards to wombats 1.7 metres long. This included various different birds.
Emus shared the open woodlands with another bird, the much larger Newton's mihirung Genyornis newtoni. It weighed 275 kilograms and grew to 2.15 metres high. The Newton's mihirung was the last survivor from an ancient family of birds that dominated the landscape for over 50 million years and were related to ducks and geese. Around 8 different species have been identified. The biggest was Dromornis stilton which stood three metres tall and weighed about a tonne, but went extinct in the Pleistocene. Though some early species of mihirung such as Bullockornis planei (the demon duck) were probably carnivores, the Newton's mihirung used its thick bill to snap up shrubs. As grassland spread throughout the Pleistocene landscape, the mihirung found it harder to find a nice habitat and eventually went extinct.

AUSTRALIAN BRUSH TURKEY Alectura lathami

Currently in Australia there are only three different species of megapode. These are the Australian brush turkey, the malleefowl and the orange-footed scrubfowl. Back in the Pleistocene there was another species. The giant malleefowl, Progura gallinacea, was 1.30 metres long and weighed 5-7 kilograms, compared with the modern-day malleefowl's 60 cm length and 2.5 kilogram weight. Like modern malleefowl, the giant mallefowl probably laid its eggs in mounds. These mounds are made of soil and compost. The heat from this incubates the eggs. The giant malleefowl was not the only giant bird in the Pleistocene. Most birds had larger forms back then. The giant coucal Centropus colossus was another of them. It probably looked a lot like the modern day pheasant coucal C. phasianinus, the only Australian coucal species that survives today. Coucals are a genus of cuckoos. Most have barred chests and long tails. Unlike normal cuckoos, they make their own nests and raise their own young instead of laying their eggs in another bird's nest. They prefer running into the undergrowth rather than flying, though they are not flightless. The giant coucal was probably even more terrestrial and was not as good at flying as the modern coucal.

HORSEFIELD'S BRONZE CUCKOO Chrysococcyx basalis

Flamingoes also once flew in Australian skies. There were different species, such as Phoeniconotius eyrensis, which lived in Lake Eyre in South Australia (at that time it was a vast inland lake home to waterbirds, lungfish, crocodiles and many marsupials), alongside another species P. novaehollandiae.  It is thought that these flamingoes were slightly larger than the living great flamingo Phoenicopteris ruber. As Australia dried out and inland waterways disappeared, flamingoes started to become extinct. Now the only flamingoes in Australia are occasional vagrants to the Cocos-Keeling Islands.
Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea were all joined together, so some New Guinean birds also lived in Australia. The northern (Casuarius unappendiculatus) and dwarf cassowaries (C. bennetti) are now restricted to New Guinea, but were once found in Australia as well. The southern cassowary (C. casuarius), the only cassowary species that still lives in Australia, probably got here by coming over the land bridge.