Unsolved mysteries · Nature & living things

A bird with a Latin name and not a single bone to prove it

Every trace of this blue, red-legged rail comes from a handful of travellers' notes written in the 1600s and 1700s. Nobody has ever found a bone, a feather or a skin, yet it was formally named as a species in 1848 and generated a long scholarly argument about what it was related to — an argument settled mostly by reasoning about plumage descriptions and geography. It is a strange case of taxonomy running entirely on eyewitness prose, and of an animal that may have retreated uphill to a highland plateau while its relatives elsewhere stayed in lowland swamps. It probably vanished under a combination of easy hunting and introduced cats, sometime after 1730.

It could fly, but rarely bothered, and it was easy to catch by hand — descriptions put it at chicken size, up to about 70 cm long, entirely blue with a red beak and legs.

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