Description
It was much smaller than other emus, with only half the weight of the mainland birds. It was about 140 cm (55 in) tall and weighed 23 kg (51 lb). It reported to have had darker plumage, but this has come into question due to a genetic study not finding genes associated with melanism. The juveniles were grey, while the chicks were striped like other emus. They ate berries, grass and seaweed, and they reportedly liked the shady area of lagoons and the shoreline. Additional traits that supposedly distinguish this bird from the mainland Emu have previously been suggested to be the distal foramen of the tarsometatarsus, and the contour of the cranium. However, the distal foramen is known to be variable in the modern Emu showing particular diversity between juvenile and adult forms and is therefore taxonomically insignificant. The same is true of the contour of the cranium, which is more dome-shaped in the King Island Emu but is in fact also seen in juvenile modern Emu.
Read more about this topic: King Island Emu
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“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)