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Having split early from Gondwana, Zealandia (now modern New Zealand) escaped discovery until the late 13th century, and therefore remains an important glimpse into a human-free world. Without humans or other land mammals, diverse and peculiar birds evolved in isolation, including several flightless moa species, the giant pouakai eagle ( Harpagornis moorei ), the kiwi ( Apteryx mantelli ), and the kakapo parrot ( Strigops habroptila ). This unique community has fascinated paleoecologists, who have spent almost two centuries devising new ways to glean information from ancient bird remains. In PNAS, Boast et al. (1) apply one recent technological advance, ancient DNA (aDNA) metabarcoding, to confirm previous discoveries and report new details about moa and kakapo diets, parasites, and niches. Their efforts confirm Zealandia was a lot different before humans arrived.Zealandia’s most diverse avian oddities were the moa. Moa research goes back to the early 1800s, when the Māori told legends to colonizing Europeans about giant birds and showed them fossilized moa bones in caves. Those fossils belonged to at least nine moa species ranging from 1 to 4 m tall, some with notable sexual dimorphism (2). The moa species have different fossil distributions, morphology, and gizzard contents, suggesting they partitioned Zealandia’s resources into distinct ecological niches. To better understand how moas coexisted and interacted with other species, paleontologists have turned to another abundant deposit that moas left behind: coprolites (fossilized dung). The 2,000 moa coprolites that have been collected thus far contain plants, fungi, microbes, and intestinal parasites (3), a priceless resource for creating ecological snapshots from Zealandia. Until the aDNA revolution, however, these snapshots were blurry (4).Sequencing aDNA allows paleontologists to identify dung-encased organisms at finer resolution than they see with a microscope. Studying aDNA is nerve-wracking, because it degrades over time … [↵][1]1To whom correspondence should be addressed. Email: klafferty{at}usgs.gov. [1]: #xref-corresp-1-1

Unique parasite aDNA in moa coprolites from New Zealand suggests mass parasite extinctions followed human-induced megafauna extinctions