Tasmanian emu
Kingdom
Phylum
Class
Family
Genus
SPECIES
Dromaius novaehollandiae diemenensis

The Tasmanian emu (Dromaius novaehollandiae diemenensis ) is an extinct subspecies of the emu. It was found in Tasmania, where it had become isolated during the Late Pleistocene. As opposed to the other insular emu taxa, the King Island emu and the Kangaroo Island emu, the population on Tasmania was sizable, meaning that there were no marked effects of small population size as in the other two isolates.

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The Tasmanian emu became extinct around 1865 according to the Australian Species Profile and Threats database. Officially this was recorded in 1997 when changes to listings of nationally threatened species saw the Tasmanian sub-species of emu added to the list of species presumed extinct.

Information regarding the emu is reliant on 19th century documentary evidence and the limited number of emu specimens in museums. As a consequence one of the biggest challenges in researching the Tasmanian emu is the many names or spellings used to describe the emu. The early colonial accounts spell it ‘emue’, Reverend Robert Knopwood spelt it as ‘emew’. Other early accounts referred to it as a ‘cassowary’ and even an ‘ostrich’. George Augustus Robinson recorded two indigenous words for the Tasmanian emu. The Oyster Bay Indigenous language word for emu is Pun.nune.ner and the Brune Indigenous language word is Gonanner.

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Appearance

The Tasmanian emu had not progressed to the point where it could be considered a distinct species and even its status as a distinct subspecies is not universally accepted, as it agreed with the mainland birds in measurements and the external characters used to distinguish it—a whitish instead of a black foreneck and throat and an unfeathered neck—apparently are also present, albeit rare, in some mainland birds. There are suggestions the bird was slightly smaller than the mainland emu, but in conflict, other evidence (including descriptions of Pleistocene remains) indicates that both are similar in size.

Distribution

Geography

There is much evidence to suggest Tasmanian emus were abundant in Van Diemen’s Land. John Latham’s 1823 publication affirms Charles Jeffrey’s observations in which he claims that mobs of emus were common and that a mob would consist of seventy or eighty birds. The Sydney Gazette in 1803 painted an image of the Van Diemen’s Land landscape, when it reported the arrival of Lieutenant Bowen on the Lady Nelson: ‘close to the Settlement are abundance of Emues, large Kangaroos, and Swans’. In 1804, it was reported that David Collins’s expedition found that ‘the emue plentiful’. In 1808 George Harris the surveyor travelled from Hobart Town to Launceston, and wrote that his party walked ‘thro the finest country in the world... the quantities of kangaroos, emus and wild ducks we saw... incredible’. The Tasmanian Indigenous people’s sustainable relationship with the emu also suggests emu population numbers were significant. Indigenous people used a substance called ‘patener’. This ointment was made from a ground metal mixed with emu fat/oil and was used to mark their heads and bodies. In 1831, Robinson described an Aboriginal dwelling, stating that the ground in front of this habitation was thickly strewed with the feathers of the emu, and the bones of the stately bird... covered the ground, which the natives had broken to pieces to obtain the marrow to anoint their head and body.

Tasmanian emu habitat map
Tasmanian emu habitat map
Tasmanian emu

References

1. Tasmanian emu Wikipedia article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmanian_emu

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