Moa 800-1,000 years old The final bird the team studied was
the moa, a giant flightless bird that lived in New Zealand until
it went extinct about 500 years ago. Resembling the roots of a tree, the clear,
interconnecting blood vessels seen here remained after this specimen's
acid bath. The small black dots are fungal spores that infiltrated the bone,
probably after the bird's death. The fact that blood vessels survived in
this and in the far older samples to follow flies in the face of conventional
thought, which holds that all soft parts degrade and disappear very quickly
after death.
