Announced November 2, 2026: a single leg bone from Liang Bua, the Indonesian cave of the 'hobbit' Homo floresiensis, belongs to a giant extinct mound-building bird, heavier than any megapode on Flores today.
The discovery itself: scientists describe Megapodius rokusi, a mound-building bird about four times the weight of the megapode that lives on Flores today, from a single fossil leg bone.
Meet the one-metre-tall 'hobbit' humans whose cave on Flores also held the giant bird's bone.
How a 2003 dig at Liang Bua uncovered a dwarf human species that survived until roughly 50,000 years ago and upended the human family tree.
Inside the limestone cave that has yielded hobbits, dwarf elephants and now a giant fowl, a layered record of the island's vanished fauna.
Megapodes don't sit on their eggs: they bury them in giant compost mounds and farm the heat. Watch a living one tend its incubator.
A family of chicken-relatives that build mounds, use decay and sun to hatch their eggs, and whose chicks dig out ready to fly.
The evolutionary rule that turns small animals huge and huge animals tiny, and that may explain a 3.9 kilogram super-megapode.
Flores also had elephant relatives shrunk to pony size, which the hobbits may have hunted. The island grew its birds and shrank its giants.