The cassowary is called the deadliest bird, yet ostriches kill more people
Casuarius cassowaries are flightless ratites of New Guinea and nearby lands—three living species. The southern cassowary ranks as the world’s fourth-tallest and third-heaviest living bird after ostriches and the emu. Wary of people, they can still maim or kill when provoked, earning a contested “most dangerous bird” label.
Cassowaries live in the tropical forests of New Guinea, the Seram and Aru islands of the Moluccas, and northeastern Australia. As ratites they lack the breastbone keel that anchors flight muscles in flying birds, a group they share with emus, rheas, ostriches and kiwi, plus the extinct moas and elephant birds. Genetic work makes the emu their closest living relative and puts the dwarf cassowary nearer the northern species than the southern. The northern cassowary was the last found and is the most threatened, and a fourth species, the pygmy cassowary, is extinct.
Females are bigger and more brightly coloured than males. Adult southern cassowaries stand 1.5 to 1.8 m, some females reaching 2 m, and cassowaries generally weigh 15 to 76 kg, though the dwarf species is far smaller. All three are shy forest birds that slip away long before people notice them, and even the southern cassowary of far north Queensland is poorly studied.
If provoked they can wound badly or kill, and they have attacked dogs and people. The popular title of world's most dangerous bird is shaky on the numbers: the common ostrich kills two or three people a year in South Africa alone.
Naming has its own history. Linnaeus coined Casuarius in 1748 but in his landmark 1758 edition lumped the bird with the ostrich and rhea, so Mathurin Jacques Brisson, who restored the genus in 1760, gets formal credit. Sorting subspecies is hard because head colours fade in specimens and because people have traded live cassowaries for thousands of years, moving birds far from home.
Source: Cassowary
