Elephant bird determined that "Vorombe titan" reached weights of and stood tall, making it the world's largest bird, slightly larger than the much older "Dromornis stirtoni". Elephant birds have been extinct since at least the 17th century. Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s, mentions an ostrich-like bird said to inhabit unpopulated regions, though it is unclear whether he was repeating folk tales passed on from generations earlier. In 1659, Flacourt wrote of the "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places
The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs has killed the goose to no purpose. It was also one of several fables applied to political issues by the American illustrator Thomas Nast. Captioned "Always killing the goose that lays the golden eggs", it appeared in "Harpers Weekly" for March 16, 1878. There the picture of the baffled farmer, advised by a 'Communistic Statesman', referred to the rail strike of 1877. The farmer stands for the politically driven union members whose wife and children sorrow in the background. The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs "To kill the Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs" is an idiom used of