Red Rail (Aphanapteryx bonasia) - A Lost Rail From Mauritius

Above: a plate by Frederick William Frohawk (1861 - 1946), wildlife artist; retrieved via Wikimedia Commons. Below: sketch of a hunted specimen ca. 1601, attributed to one Joris Joostensz Laerle; retrieved via Wikimedia Commons.

Modified from the original posted on the Archosaurophilia Tumblr on January 1, 2016.

The red rail (Aphanapteryx bonasia) was the largest of Mauritius’ rails and certainly the strangest in appearance. Similarly to the dodo and many other birds native to the Mascarene islands, it was completely flightless, and its small wings would have been concealed in life beneath its shaggy, reddish-brown plumage. The only physical remains known from this species are its pelvis and leg bones, which makes it difficult to gauge its full size in life, but contemporary accounts compare it in size to a large hen. Within the rail family, its closest relative seems to be the Rodrigues rail (Erythromachus leguati), also extinct. More distantly, it is allied with the white-throated rail (Dryolimnas cuvieri) of Madagascar, the Seychelles, and Comoros, which today appears to be the only endemic flightless bird remaining on the Indian Ocean’s islands.

Its slender, vaguely ibis-like bill suggests a cursorial foraging lifestyle, preying on small invertebrates. The now-extinct land snail Tropidophora carinata, also endemic to Mauritius, appears to have been one such prey item, as some subfossilized shells belonging to this species carry blunt damage marks consistent with this bird’s beak.

Sadly, very little is known for sure about the red rail, since like many other flightless birds of the world’s oceanic islands, it became extinct a short time after humans colonized its home. The tropical forests of Mauritius began to shrink after the island was claimed by the Dutch East India Company in the 17th Century, spelling doom for this rail, the dodo, and many others, as overhunting and deforestation disrupted their habitat. By 1700, the Red rail had disappeared forever.

Puzzling over this flightless rail and the dodo, centuries before Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, English adventurer Peter Mundy observed:

“Of these 2 sorts off fowl afforementionede, For oughtt wee yett know, Not any to bee Found out of this Iland, which lyeth aboutt 100 leagues From St. Lawrence. A question may bee demaunded how they should bee here and Not elcewhere, beeing soe Farer From other land and can Neither fly or swymme; whither by Mixture off kindes producing straunge and Monstrous formes, or the Nature of the Climate, ayer and earth in alltring the First shapes in long tyme, or how.”