Movement and Behaviour of the New Zealand Eagle Ray. Myliobatis tenuicaudatus

However, three sets of discoveries have demolished this conviction. Firstly, much of New Zealand was covered with glaciers or cold tundra during the last Ice Age ending about 10,000 years ago. Since then, the New Zealand climate has become much more favourable, with warmer temperatures and the spread of magnificent forests. The last moas died with their gizzards full of food, and enjoying the best climate that they had seen for tens of thousands of years. Secondly, radiocarbon-dated bird bones from dated Maori archaeological sites prove that all known moa species were still present in abundance when the first Maoris stepped ashore. So were the extinct goose, duck, swan, eagle, and other birds now known only from fossil bones. Within a few centuries, the moas and most of those other birds were extinct. It would have been an incredible coincidence if every individual of dozens of species that had occupied New Zealand for millions of years chose the precise geological moment of human arrival as the occasion to drop dead in synchrony ...»