Discovery attacking a moa pair Before the arrival of humans, the moa's only predator was the massive
Haast's eagle. New Zealand had been isolated for 80 million years and had few predators before human arrival, meaning that not only were its ecosystems extremely vulnerable to perturbation by outside species, but also the native species were ill-equipped to cope with human predators. Polynesians arrived sometime before 1300 C.E., and all moa genera were soon driven to extinction by hunting and, to a lesser extent, by habitat reduction due to forest clearance. By 1445 C.E., all moa had become extinct, along with Haast's eagle, which had relied on them for food. Recent research using
carbon-14 dating of
middens strongly suggests that the events leading to extinction took less than a hundred years, rather than a period of exploitation lasting several hundred years as previously hypothesised. An expedition in the 1850s under Lieutenant A. Impey reported two emu-like birds on a hillside in the South Island; an 1861 story from the
Nelson Examiner told of three-toed footprints measuring between
Tākaka and
Riwaka that were found by a surveying party; and finally in 1878, the
Otago Witness published an additional account from a farmer and his shepherd. In childhood, Mackenzie saw a large bird that she believed to be a
takahē, but after its rediscovery in the 1940s, she saw a picture of it and concluded that she had seen something else. Some authors have speculated that a few
Megalapteryx didinus may have persisted in remote corners of New Zealand until the 18th and even 19th centuries, but this view is not widely accepted. Some Māori hunters claimed to be in pursuit of the moa as late as the 1770s; however, these accounts possibly did not refer to the hunting of actual birds as much as a now-lost ritual among South Islanders.
Whalers and
sealers recalled seeing monstrous birds along the coast of the South Island, and in the 1820s, a man named George Pauley made an unverified claim of seeing a moa in the Otago region of New Zealand. and as recently as 2008,
Cryptozoologists continue to search for them, but their claims and supporting evidence (such as of purported footprints) have earned little attention from experts and are
pseudoscientific. Dieffenbach also refers to a fossil from the area near Mt Hikurangi, and surmises that it belongs to "a bird, now extinct, called Moa (or Movie) by the natives". 'Movie' is the first transcribed name for the bird. In 1839, John W. Harris, a
Poverty Bay flax trader who was a natural-history enthusiast, was given a piece of unusual bone by a Māori who had found it in a river bank. He showed the fragment of bone to his uncle, John Rule, a Sydney surgeon, who sent it to
Richard Owen, who at that time was working at the Hunterian Museum at the
Royal College of Surgeons in London. 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. They occur in a range of late
Quaternary and
Holocene sedimentary deposits, but are most common in three main types of site:
caves,
dunes, and
swamps. Bones are commonly found in caves or
tomo (the Māori word for doline or
sinkhole, often used to refer to pitfalls or vertical cave shafts). The two main ways that the moa bones were deposited in such sites were birds that entered the cave to nest or escape bad weather, and subsequently died in the cave and birds that fell into a vertical shaft and were unable to escape. Moa bones (and the bones of other extinct birds) have been found in caves throughout New Zealand, especially in the
limestone/
marble areas of northwest Nelson,
Karamea,
Waitomo, and
Te Anau. Moa bones and eggshell fragments sometimes occur in active coastal sand dunes, where they may erode from
paleosols and concentrate in '
blowouts' between dune ridges. Many such moa bones antedate human settlement, although some originate from Māori
midden sites, which frequently occur in dunes near harbours and river mouths (for example the large moa hunter sites at
Shag River, Otago, and
Wairau Bar,
Marlborough). Densely intermingled moa bones have been encountered in swamps throughout New Zealand. The most well-known example is at
Pyramid Valley in north Canterbury, where bones from at least 183 individual moa have been excavated, mostly by
Roger Duff of
Canterbury Museum. Many explanations have been proposed to account for how these deposits formed, ranging from poisonous spring waters to floods and wildfires. However, the currently accepted explanation is that the bones accumulated slowly over thousands of years, from birds that entered the swamps to feed and became trapped in the soft sediment. Many New Zealand and international museums hold moa bone collections.
Auckland War Memorial Museum – Tāmaki Paenga Hira has a significant collection, and in 2018 several moa skeletons were imaged and 3D scanned to make the collections more accessible. There is also a major collection in
Otago Museum in
Dunedin.
In literature and culture Heinrich Harder portrayed moa being hunted by Māori in the classic German collecting cards about extinct and prehistoric animals,
Tiere der Urwelt, in the early 1900s. The moa was the most commonly used animal as a symbol of New Zealand before it was replaced by the kiwi in the early 20th century.
Allen Curnow's poem, "The Skeleton of the Great Moa in the Canterbury Museum, Christchurch" was published in 1943.
Potential revival The creature has frequently been mentioned as
a potential candidate for revival by cloning. Its iconic status, coupled with the facts that it only became extinct a few hundred years ago and that substantial quantities of moa remains exist, mean that it is often listed alongside such creatures as the
dodo as leading candidates for
de-extinction. Preliminary work involving the extraction of
DNA has been undertaken by Japanese geneticist Ankoh Yasuyuki Shirota. Interest in the moa's potential for revival was further stirred in mid-2014 when New Zealand Member of Parliament
Trevor Mallard suggested that bringing back some smaller species of moa within 50 years was a viable idea. The idea was ridiculed by many, but gained support from some natural history experts. In July 2025, American biotechnology
Colossal Biosciences announced early phases of plans to "revive" the South Island giant moa by adding moa genes to a related species in collaboration with the Ngāi Tahu Research Centre with funding from
Peter Jackson. ==See also==