Æpyornis Island Æpyornis Island "Æpyornis Island", or "Aepyornis Island", is a short story by H. G. Wells, first published in 1894 in the "Pall Mall Budget". It was included in "The Stolen Bacillus and Other Incidents", the first collection of short stories by Wells, first published in 1895. In the story, a man looking for eggs of "Aepyornis", an extinct flightless bird, passes two years alone on a small island with an "Aepyornis" that has hatched. "Aepyornis maximus" (the Giant elephant-bird) was a giant flightless bird that lived in Madagascar; it became extinct probably because it was hunted excessively by humans. The
Elephant Spit Spit Bay to the north and west and is formed of sediments derived from the glacial erosion of volcanic material from eruptions by Big Ben which have made the seabed south-east of the island relatively shallow. Heard Island is isolated, uninhabited and rarely visited. When the island was visited in 2002 and 2003 by scientists from the Australian Antarctic Division, the spit was intact. However, a following visit in late 2008 found that a section of the eastern end of the spit had become inundated by the ocean, forming a 2-km-long island. Elephant Spit Elephant Spit is a 9 km