DUNEDIN, NEW ZEALAND—Stuff.co.nz reports that New Zealand’s native black swans were hunted to extinction by Polynesians in the fifteenth century. Nic Rawlence of the University of Otago Palaeogenetics Laboratory and his team compared the skeletons of living birds and fossilized swan remains, and examined DNA samples of the birds. The researchers concluded that almost all of the black swans now living in New Zealand are descended from swans brought from Australia in the 1860s. The native swans also arrived from Australia, but between one and two million years ago. They were heavier, and had longer legs and smaller wings, and might have eventually become flightless in another million years, Rawlence said. It had been thought the black swans living in New Zealand now were the same species as those found in the fossil record. Rawlence and his colleagues dubbed the fossil species “pouwa,” after a black bird that lived in the Chatham Islands in a Moriori legend. For more, go to “Angry Birds.”
