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
Famous quotes containing the word description:
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The great object in life is Sensation—to feel that we exist, even though in pain; it is this “craving void” which drives us to gaming, to battle, to travel, to intemperate but keenly felt pursuits of every description whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)