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In July 2004, the Natural History Museum in London placed on display the moa bone fragment Owen had first examined, to celebrate 200 years since his birth, and in memory of Owen as founder of the museum. Since the discovery of the first moa bones in the late 1830s, thousands more have been found.
Bones of D. novaezealandiae are quite rare, as most of the land surface containing moa bones was lost throughout New Zealand due to extensive land clearance for agriculture during the nineteenth and twentieth century. This means that nowadays the bones are only found in remote, rarely visited sites. [21]: 254
The crested moa weighed around 75 kg (165 lb). [citation needed] The crested moa was smaller than the heavy-footed moa (Pachyornis elephantopus) and their bones are sometimes mistaken for those of P. elephantopus due to their similar structure. [7] [8] Almost nothing is known about the feather pits on the crested moa's skull.
Twenty years later, a skull was acquired that fit the skeleton. In 1933, a large collection of bones were discovered at Makirikiri. [6] Five years later the museum, with a £1200 excavation budget, launched an excavation using a crane, bucket and sluice. About two thousand moa bones were found by hand-sorting through hundreds of cubic yards of mud.
Only one specimen of a complete or partially complete moa egg has been assigned to the South Island giant moa, found around KaikÅura. This egg, 240 millimetres (9.4 in) in length and 178 millimetres (7.0 in) in width, was the largest moa egg found in museum collections as of 2006. [6]
The lower layers of the midden also showed that early moa bones were not smashed to get at the marrow as was common in the upper layers. Whale bones were found in the lower layer. Mainly moa leg bones were found indicating that moa were hunted inland and brought to the site for cooking. More than 4000 moa were consumed at the site. [9]
The species has the best-preserved mummified remains of any moa species. [12] Several specimens with soft tissue and feather remains are known: British Museum A16, found at Queenstown in 1876, is the type of the species preserving a mummified head and partial neck along with two mummified partial hindlimbs.
The dodo skeleton Richard Owen put together from bones found in the Mare aux Songes. Remains of over 300 dodos were found in the swamp, but only very few skull and wing bones among them, which may be explained by the upper bodies having been washed away or scavenged while the lower body was trapped, which is similar to the way many moa remains ...