Moa, Moa and More Moa

New scientific evidence reveals that humans may not be entirely responsible for the extinction of the moa. According to research undertaken in NZ and the US, there were 3 to 12 million moa roaming the forests thousands of years before the arrival of humans, by which time the estimated moa population had dropped to a mere 159,000. This suggests that moa were already in serious decline due to an earlier and equally dramatic biological or environmental event. “We were really surprised because we had been very conservative with all the parameters we used,” said study Director Neil Gemmell of Canterbury University. “It suggests that moa were very common indeed.”