| Brief Description |
The front part of the beak, which was relatively short and delicate in the genus Pachyornis, suggesting these birds were not adapted for shearing and clipping coarse vegetation like other moa. Collected by Taylor Brown from a tomo or sinkhole on Motukawa Land Co Ltd farm, Moawhango Valley Road near Taihape in December 2000, and donated by landowner Warren Plimmer. Mantell’s Moa (Pachyornis geranoides) was one of the smallest moa species, just 1 m high at the shoulder and weighing 20 to 30 kg. It preferred to live around the edges of swamps and forests. Like all moa species, it was wiped out by human hunting about 500 years ago.
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