THE island paradise of Fiji was once home to some truly monstrous reptiles, amphibians and birds. Over the past two years, palaeontologists and archaeologists working for the Central Pacific Colonisation project have found bones from a lost "megafauna" in limestone caves in the west of Viti Levu, the archipelago's main island.
Included among the finds is a giant flightless pigeon which stood 80 centimetres tall and looked like a dodo. Other discoveries include an iguana about 1.5 metres in length, a giant frog measuring 25 centimetres, a giant tortoise and a land crocodile 2 metres long.
Project head Atholl Anderson of the Australian National University in Canberra says that the discoveries solve a long-standing puzzle, as similarly large extinct beasts have been found in New Caledonia and Tonga, on either side of the Fijian archipelago. "It's always been suspected that there would be megafauna on Fiji," he says.
Because many ...
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