One elephant bird egg held as much as 160 chicken eggs.

1000

At up to 13 litres, these are the largest eggs known from any bird or reptile, dinosaurs included.

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The event

• Extinction of the elephant birdsc. 1000 · Madagascar. Elephant birds, flightless giants up to 3 m tall that laid the largest eggs ever known, vanished between about 800 and 1050 according to the latest radiocarbon dates, along with Madagascar's hippos. Human burning of forest for pasture is blamed.

10th century

More amazing facts

• 999 Pope Sylvester II's love of mathematics earned him a sorcerer's reputation.
• 1000 · 1057 The oldest book of Rus was found only in 2000: three wax tablets with psalms from early 11th-century Novgorod.
• 1000 · 1021 Vikings reached America at about the time Polynesians reached Hawaii.
• 1002 · 1010 The two great women of Japanese classical literature did not get on. Murasaki Shikibu, author of Genji, wrote that Sei Shōnagon of The Pillow Book was 'dreadfully conceited' and littered her writing with Chinese characters.
• 1002 An Icelandic lawspeaker lost his job because his voice was too weak.
• 1004 Europe first saw the fork as a sin. When a Byzantine bride married into the Doge’s family around 1004 and ate with a golden fork, Saint Peter Damian denounced her decadence.

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