The snipe-rail ( Capellirallus karamu) is an extinct flightless Rallidae endemic to the North Island of New Zealand. The species' name is derived from the Karamu Cave[Ripley, S. D. (1977): Rails of the World - A Monograph of the Family Rallidae. Boston. ] from Hamilton
Description
The snipe-rail was a relatively small
Rallidae[Tennyson, A. & Martinson, P. (2006): Extinct Birds of New Zealand; Te Papa Press, Wellington, New Zealand. ] which had a bill of about 7 cm, very long in proportion to its body size.
Its weight was about 240 g.
The type material consists of an incomplete
skeleton, including
, a
pelvis, and a
hind limb.
Since the discovery of these remains, many complete skeletons
consisting of hundreds of bones
have been unearthed on different sites in the North Island.
Its evolutionary relationships to other rail species are unclear
but the structure of its bones suggests that it might have been a relative of the likewise extinct
Chatham rail.
Relative to its body size, the snipe-rail had the smallest wings of all known rail species.
It also had a disproportionately large
tarsometatarsus.
Habitat and ecology
The bone findings were in the western areas of the North Island,
where wetter, closed-canopy
prevailed.
The bird's long bill suggests that it was able to forage by probing in a similar manner to kiwi.
Extinction
The exact date of the snipe-rail's extinction is unknown, but it is supposed that the decline began in the 13th century,
when the
Polynesian rat/
Polynesian rat became widespread in New Zealand.
[Janet M. Wilmshurst, Atholl J. Anderson, Thomas F. G. Higham, and Trevor H. Worthy (2008). Dating the late prehistoric dispersal of Polynesians to New Zealand using the commensal Pacific rat In: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105, pp. 7676-7680.]
Further reading
-
Worthy, Trevor H. & Holdaway, Richard N. : The Lost World of the Moa. Prehistoric Life of New Zealand. Indiana University Press, Bloomington 2002.
-
Scarlett, Ron (1970): The genus Capellirallus In: Notornis (1970) :pp. 303–319. Quarterly Journal of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand.
External links
