Nuku Hiva rail

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Nuku Hiva rail (Gallirallus epulare) was a flightless bird in the rail family that lived on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas, French Polynesia. It went extinct long ago and is known from subfossil bones found in a kitchen midden at the Ha'atuatua archaeological site. The bones were collected in 1994–1995 and the species was described in 2007 by Kirchman and Steadman. The site dates to about 1,000 years before present, around the early period of human settlement on the island. The name epulare comes from Latin for “of a banquet,” referring to the meals found with the bones. Classification: Animalia; Chordata; Aves; Gruiformes; Rallidae; Gallirallus; G. epulare.