Tongoenas, also known as the Tongan giant pigeon, is an extinct genus of giant pigeon that grew up to long that was once native to the islands of Tonga. It had existed as a genus for at least 60,000 years, and went extinct around 850–600 BCE. The type species and only known species, T. burleyi, was named in 2020 based on subfossil remains.
Tongoenas, also known as the Tongan giant pigeon, is an extinct genus of giant pigeon that grew up to long that was once native to the islands of Tonga. It had existed as a genus for at least 60,000 years, and went extinct around 850–600 BCE. The type species and only known species, T. burleyi, was named in 2020 based on subfossil remains.
==Description== The only known Tongoenas specimens were found in a cave, which preserved subfossil remains. The large bird was thought to have been hunted and consumed by early human settlers, when they reached the Pacific Islands. It is known from Foa, Lifuka, `Uiha, Ha`afeva, Tongatapu, and `Eua. The research team, while exploring the island, noticed the trees on the island were larger than assumed, bearing exceedingly-large fruits. Lead author David W. Steadman states:
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).