A modern marabou stork from Sub-Saharan Africa. I believe Kent Hovind took a Kenyan's account of these birds as proof that pterodactyls still exist.
A giant flightless relative of the marabou stork that lived 20,000 to 50,000 years ago has been documented on Indonesian island of Flores. It stood nearly 6 feet tall, and if its behavior had been anything like modern marabou storks, it may have preyed on the Hobbit people (Homo floresiensis).
In addition to tiny hominin and giant marabou storks, the island has been home to dwarf elephants and giant rats that were about the same size as the Hobbits. The Komodo dragon was also on the island during this time, and it is still found there today.
This was once one crazy island.
Giant lizards, rats, and marabou storks and dwarf people and elephants– it sounds stranger than any island in a science fiction novel.
These animals became extinct around the time modern humans showed up on the islands, so it is possible that the arrival of our species was a major cause of their extinction. It is possible, but correlation does not always indicate causation. More study is needed.
Still, it would have been cool to have seen a six-foot marabou stork. I bet it was one of the island’s top predators and may have competed with Komodo dragons over kills. Komodo dragons kill in a unique way, not only do they have venom in their bites ,but they have a lot of nasty bacteria in their saliva. They hunt simply by biting a deer or water buffalo and letting the bacteria cause horrible infection. Because this is in the tropics, the infections move fairly rapidly. All they have to do is bite a deer or buffalo every once in a while, and they have plenty of carcasses around. It is likely that this giant marabou was deeply dependent upon the dragons to keep it in carrion. Maybe it was reliant upon the carcasses of dwarf elephant, and when those elephants went extinct, the marabous starved to death. It is often suggested that the dragons evolved to hunt the dwarf elephant, but when those went extinct, it started hunting deer and water buffalo, and those may have not provided enough meat for the stork.
