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Hard-shelled eggs vary in size, from small eggs, such as that of a hummingbird or chicken, to the huge egg that belongs to the extinct Madagascan elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus.

Last year a complete egg of an aepyornis maximus, otherwise known as an elephant bird, sold for $130,000 – roughly five times what it would have gone for a decade earlier.

Just a few thousand years ago, gargantuan fauna roamed the planet, from the gorilla-sized sloth lemur Archaeoindris fontoynontii to the elephant bird Aepyornis maximus.

His conclusion, published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science, is that there were actually three genera of elephant bird rather than two, and four species rather than 15: Mulleornis modestus, Aepyornis hildebrandti, Aepyornis maximus and Vorombe titan.

One of those species, A. maximus, had long been considered the heaviest elephant bird, until a British scientist in 1894 claimed to have discovered an even larger species, Aepyornis titan.