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
Largest prehistoric animals size. Total length was probably up to in female and they weighed about . The largest extinct "Titanohierax" was a giant hawk about 8 kilograms that lived in the Antilles, where it was among the top predators. The largest-known in this group was a giant flightless "Sylviornis", a bird long and weighing up to about . The largest-known songbird is the extinct giant grosbeak ("Chloridops regiskongi") at long. The largest-known cormorant was the spectacled cormorant of the North Pacific ("Phalacrocorax perspicillatus"), which became extinct around 1850, was larger still, averaging around and . The largest-known in this group—which has been