For nearly 17 years, a fossil leg bone from Liang Bua cave on Indonesia’s Flores Island sat unstudied, even though the cave is famous for the remains of Homo floresiensis. Researchers have now identified it as a new species of megapode, a chicken-like bird that lived between 190,000 and 120,000 years ago.
The find is the first megapode fossil ever reported from Wallacea, the island region between mainland Asia and Australia. It also offers a rare glimpse of bird life from a time for which scientists have very little evidence. The study, published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, describes the bird as one of the largest known members of its group.
The bone was discovered in 2009 in one of Liang Bua’s deepest layers. At first, researchers recognized it only as a bird bone and set it aside. Years later, Hanneke Meijer, a professor and osteology curator at the University Museum of Bergen, and her colleagues compared it with bones from living and extinct megapodes. The fossil had toe joints that differed in shape and position from other megapodes, while its leg’s size and form pointed to a particularly large bird.
The team named the species Megapodius rokusi, honoring Rokus Due Awe. Due Awe first recognized the bones of Homo floresiensis and later identified this fossil as belonging to a bird. Meijer called him “an incredible self-taught zooarchaeologist” and said it was an honor to name the species after him.
Researchers estimate M. rokusi weighed about 3.9 kilograms, or 8.6 pounds. That makes it the largest Megapodius yet found. Flores’s orange-footed scrubfowl, a megapode living on the island today, weighs just 0.5 to 1.2 kilograms. Megapodes are known for an unusual way of raising their young: instead of sitting on their eggs, they bury them in large mounds or burrows and leave them to hatch.
One leg bone cannot answer every question. With no wing bones, researchers do not know whether M. rokusi could fly. They also cannot say exactly when it disappeared. It may have died out around the time of other animals known from Liang Bua, including a giant stork, a dwarf Stegodon, Homo floresiensis and vultures, or it may have vanished much earlier.
Even with those unknowns, the fossil adds an important piece to the region’s sparse bird record. Meijer says bird bones have often been overlooked while researchers focused on mammal remains, and she suspects more megapode fossils may still be waiting to be found. The discovery is a reminder that modern wildlife captures only part of Southeast Asia’s deep past—and that overlooked bones can still change what scientists know about it.