Besides my recent Cryptomundo postings on the dodo and the moa-nalo, I have written other past entries here, which have reviewed the following often cryptic flightless bird species: elephant bird, more dodo, terror birds, more terror birds, moa, more moa, and takahē.

In line with a question during an earlier discussion about how might have the dodo really appeared, the famed artist and Hollywood special effects man Bill Munn, well-known for his reconstruction of Gigantopithecus (below), contacted me.

Munns wrote: “I have done scientific reconstructions of the Dodo (of how they may have looked) with all coloration based on actual descriptions and the head sculpted from a skull cast provided by the Harvard Museum of Natural History.”

The following reconstruction is what Bill Munns created of the dodo, and may be the closest thing we have to how a living dodo looked in the wild.

Additionally, Munns attached a portrait photo of Aepyornis maximus, the elephant bird, based on a skull cast of the best specimen in the Natural History Museum of Paris, done for a full body reconstruction that the museum now has in its collection.

Speaking of what extinct birds might have looked like, Darren Naish has a new somewhat technical blog entitled “You’re Not a Protophorusrhacid,” with some words about the following reconstruction:

Rufous-vented Chachalaca.