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
Dinosaur egg size (usually not much longer than a centimeter or two) and lack of an eggshell with its typical anatomy. Stones: The erosive effects of water can sometimes round rocks into egg-like shapes. Paleontologists' knowledge of the structure of dinosaur eggs is limited to the hard shell. However, it can be inferred that dinosaur eggs had an amnion, chorion, and an allantois, the three major membranes in modern bird and reptile eggs. Dinosaur eggs vary greatly in size and shape, but even the largest dinosaur eggs ("Megaloolithus") are smaller than the largest known bird eggs, which were laid by the extinct