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ghost of two awkward birds that have become emblem of extinction are headed for the auction pulley next calendar month .
The auction sale house Christie ’s declare this week that it ’s sell a femur pearl fragment of a fogy shuttlecock and a massive sub - ossified elephant bird egg that ’s 100 time the size of a wimp egg .
Elephant bird egg up for auction
Elephant birds wereflightless creaturesthat stand 10 foot ( 3 meters ) tall and lived on theisland of Madagascaruntil they were driven to extinction by the eighteenth century , possibly due to factors like disease introduce by settler or humans ' unsustainable appetite for their eggs .
Their eggs indeed would have been big enough to eat a family , or several ; the complete one up for vendue measure 9 inches ( 21 centimeters ) in diam and 12 inches ( 30 cm ) in tiptop . It ’s wait to sell for up to $ 45,000 .
The piece of bone up for sale comes from another clumsy flightless bird , the dodo , which fly from a bantam island east of Madagascar called Mauritius by the late seventeenth century , less than a hundred years after its discovery .
A reconstruction of the dodo. The animal is thought to have gone extinct sometime in the mid- to late-1600s.
According to Christie ’s , the femur bone was " almost for certain " excavated in 1865 in a coastal Ngaio Marsh on Mauritius cry Mare aux Songes during a jibe by George Clark ( 1807 - 1873 ) , a British instinctive history partizan .
Zoologist Julian Hume of the Natural History Museum in London said thisdodo off-white fragmenthas limited value to skill since it ’s one of many hundreds that have been gather up from Mare aux Songes , and the osteology of the bird is already well known . But scientist who study the dodo ’s former stomping grounds might be distressed about the bombilation , especially if the os bit goes for up to $ 22,000 , as Christie ’s expects .
" The big concern is that if it deal for a lot of money , there may be a big increase in larceny from institutional collection or attempts to rob fossil vicinity like the Mare aux Songes for profit , " Hume told LiveScience . " This would result in serious legal injury to the site and reduce the chances of obtaining any more selective information about the original animal and vegetation of Mauritius . "
A fossil - rifle craze at the site would not be unprecedented .
" Ironically , this is exactly what materialize back in the mid-1860s when the Mare aux Songes was first come across , " Hume added . " In 1866 , Richard Owen , founder of the Natural History Museum in London , arranged the purchase of 100 bones for the princely sum of £ 100 . This set off a spare for all , and within a few age the original site was completely use up of fossil bone cloth . "
The auction will take seat in London on April 24 .
