--- title: Terror birds, moas, giant insects and other lost giants — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Terror birds, moas, giant insects and other lost giants», a lesson of the biology course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: After the dinosaurs, the world grew new giants: terror birds taller than a man with beaks like axes, moas taller t --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/) / Terror birds, moas, giant insects and… # Terror birds, moas, giant insects and other lost giants Lesson 274 of the biology course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/0/) — After the dinosaurs, the world grew new giants: terror birds taller than a man with beaks like axes, moas taller than a basketball hoop, and a hornless rhino as heavy as several elephants. - [2](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/2/) — Warmth and air helped: big insects breathe through tubes, which works better with more oxygen, and cold-blooded snakes like 13-metre Titanoboa can grow bigger where it is hotter. - [3](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/3/) — Islands play tricks with size: on Sicily and Crete elephants shrank to the size of a pony, while on other islands small animals grew big, like the Komodo dragon. - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/4/) — In New Zealand the moas and the giant Haast's eagle that hunted them were gone within about 200 years after people arrived, a warning of how fast giants can vanish. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/5/) — Terror birds were meat-eating birds of South America with small wings they could not fly with, some about 3 metres tall, with hooked beaks like axes; they lived until about 2 million years ago. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/6/) — Moas were giant plant-eating birds of New Zealand, up to about 3.6 metres tall with the neck up; the Haast's eagle, the biggest eagle ever, hunted them. - [7](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/7/) — People arrived in New Zealand around 1300 and hunted the moas, which had never met a hunter on land before; the moas died out within about 200 years, and the Haast's eagle, having lost the big birds it hunted, died out with them. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/8/) — The elephant bird of Madagascar laid eggs bigger than about 150 hen's eggs together and was one of the heaviest birds ever; it died out about 1,000 years ago. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/9/) — Meganeura, a dragonfly cousin from 300 million years ago, had wings about 70 centimetres across; more oxygen in the air then helped big insects breathe through their tubes. - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/10/) — Arthropleura was a millipede relative as long as a car that lived in the coal forests and probably ate plants; the coal we burn comes from those forests. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/11/) — Titanoboa was a snake about 13 metres long that lived in a hot swamp in Colombia 60 million years ago and probably ate fish and crocodiles. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/12/) — Gigantopithecus was a giant ape, maybe 3 metres tall, that lived in China until about 300,000 years ago; we know it only from teeth and jaws, and there is no evidence that Bigfoot exists. - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/13/) — Sarcosuchus was a crocodile relative about 11 metres long that lived in Africa alongside dinosaurs; its snout ended in a bulb, like a gharial's. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/14/) — Paraceratherium, a hornless rhino of Asia, was about 5 metres tall at the shoulder, ate leaves from treetops and was the biggest land mammal ever. - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/15/) — On islands such as Sicily and Crete elephants became pony-sized, because with little food and no big hunters, small bodies did better. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/274-terror-birds-moas-giant-insects-and-lost-giants/16/) — Almost all big animals have been found, but many new kinds of small animals are named every year; one ocean project reported over 800 new kinds in 2024, and most living species are still unnamed. - ← previous: [Megalodon and the giants of the sea, past and present](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/273-megalodon-and-the-giants-of-the-sea/) - next →: [Fossils: how a living thing turns to stone and how we dig it up](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/275-fossils-how-a-living-thing-turns-to-stone-and-how-we-dig-it-up/) - ↑ back to [Biology](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/biology/)