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About the Moa-Nalo:
About three million years ago, a population of mallard-like ducks managed to reach the Hawaiian islands, smack in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Once ensconced in this remote, isolated habitat, these lucky pioneers evolved in a very strange direction: flightless, goose-like, stocky-legged birds that fed not on small animals, fish and insects (like most other birds) but exclusively on plants. Collectively known as Moa-Nalo, these birds actually comprised three separate, but closely related, genera--Chelychelynechen, Thambetochen and Ptaiochen. (We can thank modern science for what we know about the Moa-Nalo: analysis of fossilized coprolites has yielded information about their diet, and traces of preserved DNA point to their duck ancestry.)
Since--like the distantly related Dodo Bird--the Moa-Nalo had no natural enemies, you can probably guess the reason it went extinct. As far as archeologists can tell, the first human settlers arrived on the Hawaiian islands about 1,200 years ago, and found the Moa-Nalo easy pickings (since this bird was unfamiliar with humans, or with any natural predators, it must have possessed a very trusting nature); it didn't help that these human pioneers also brought with them the usual complement of rats and cats, which further decimated the Moa-Nalo population. This prehistoric bird disappeared about 1,000 years ago, and was unknown to modern naturalists until the discovery of numerous fossils in the early 1980's.
