Book excerpt: Prodigious Birds brings together the entire field of moa-related research, some 150 years of enquiry. The moa was a large flightless bird, hunted into extinction by the Maori tribes of New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans. Atholl Anderson brings an historical perspective to the development of moa research and its formative debates, analytical methods and results, reviewing evidence from palaeontology, biology, archaeology, ethnography and history.