The 'extinct' giant crane never went extinct — it was just the common crane, standing taller

For 150 years, museum drawers held bones of Grus primigenia, a supposed giant crane that vanished from Europe after the last ice age. Dr John Stewart's team at Bournemouth University has now read the ancient DNA in 18 of those bones — collected in England, Wales, France, Germany and the Balearic Islands — and the giant turns out to be no separate species at all: the bones are large males of the common crane that still flies over Europe today. Earlier scientists, working from bone size alone, had mistaken the natural size gap between male and female cranes for two different species. The finding, published in Royal Society Open Science with Stockholm's Centre for Palaeogenetics, carries a hopeful correction: 'It may be that we have overestimated the number of extinctions in the past,' Stewart says. 'Some of these may instead represent size changes to living species.'