Cassowary size chart: height, weight and record size!

Cassowaries are giant birds native to Australia, New Guinea, and Indonesia. Their unique appearance has attracted considerable attention. Cassowaries have giant paws with razor-sharp claws, ridges on their heads called “porridge”, and they can reach epic proportions compared to other species of birds! However, you might be wondering if cassowaries are the largest birds in the world, how big they can get, and how large the largest cassowaries have ever been on sightings. We’ll cover all the details and more below!

Cassowary size: how tall and how heavy are they?

Cassowaries belong to the Palaeognathae clade, which includes mostly flightless birds such as ostriches. If you think that large flightless birds are rare, you are absolutely right! In general, less than 1% of birds belong to this rare collection of flightless species.

Cassowaries can reach sizes that are virtually unmatched among other bird species. The largest cassowary species are the southern and northern cassowaries, reaching the same height. Females are larger than males, and females of southern cassowaries reach 5 feet 9 inches. On average, they weigh about 128 pounds (58 kg).

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Another type of cassowary is the dwarf cassowary. It lives further inland, in the mountains, and does not reach the size of its southern and northern neighbors. Pygmy cassowaries reach a maximum weight of around 57 pounds.

Which cassowary was the largest ever recorded?

The largest cassowaries are believed to reach 170 pounds! Cassowaries live in dense forests in isolated areas. This leads to the fact that surprisingly little is known about this species. This size puts southern cassowaries almost on the verge of being the largest bird in the world today, but one type of bird tilts the scales even more heavily.

How do cassowaries compare to extinct birds such as the elephant bird and moa?

Cassowaries are extremely large, but they will have to settle for runner-up status. The largest bird in the world is the common ostrich, which weighs 320 pounds.

(Another ostrich species, the Somali ostrich, was recently identified as a new species in 2014, which could push the cassowary to third place in some tournaments.)

In the not too distant past, cassowaries would have had more competition. The elephant bird lived in Madagascar and weighed up to 1,600 pounds, about five times the size of the largest ostriches! Believe it or not, these giant birds became extinct only 1000 years ago due to human hunting.

Another large flightless bird was the moa, which suffered a similar fate. Human settlers first arrived in New Zealand around 1300, and fossil evidence shows they only became extinct about 100 years later. The moa were thought to weigh over 500 pounds, which is about four times the size of the average female southern cassowary.