Cassowary

Casuarius is a genus of birds in the order Casuariiformes, whose members are the cassowaries. It is classified as a ratite (flightless bird without a keel on its sternum bone) and is native to the tropical forests of New Guinea (Papua New Guinea and Indonesia), East Nusa Tenggara, the Maluku Islands, and northeastern Australia.

There are three extant species. The most common of these, the southern cassowary, is the third-tallest and second-heaviest living bird, smaller only than the ostrich and emu. The other two species are represented by the northern cassowary and the dwarf cassowary.

A fourth but extinct species is represented by the pygmy cassowary.

Cassowaries feed mainly on fruit, although all species are truly omnivorous and will take a range of other plant food, including shoots and grass seeds, in addition to fungi, invertebrates, and small vertebrates. Cassowaries are very wary of humans, but if provoked they are capable of inflicting serious, even fatal, injuries to both dogs and people. The cassowary has often been labeled “the world’s most dangerous bird”.

The genus Casuarius was erected by the French scientist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in his Ornithologie published in 1760.[5] The type species is the southern cassowary (Casuarius casuarius).[6] The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus had introduced the genus Casuarius in the sixth edition of his Systema Naturae published in 1748,[7] but Linnaeus dropped the genus in the important tenth edition of 1758 and put the southern cassowary together with the common ostrich and the greater rhea in the genus Struthio.[8][9]

As the publication date of Linnaeus’s sixth edition was before the 1758 starting point of the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature, Brisson, and not Linnaeus, is considered as the authority for the genus.