This is the card art for Roz Gibson's 6th Extinction Card Deck. it depicts Aepyornis maximus, the Elephant Bird of Madagascar, at the edge of a baobab grove at twilight. Art like this took a lot of homework, but I am satisfied with the results. This will be one piece of many by other artists that will be available as a deck of cards, depicting recently extinct fauna by many different artists, and will be available at Anthrocon from  RGibson

Étienne de Flacourt, a French governor of Madagascar in the 1640s and 1650s described the bird, thusly, "vouropatra – a large bird which haunts the Ampatres and lays eggs like the ostriches; so that the people of these places may not take it, it seeks the most lonely places."

Aepyornis, believed to have been more than 3 m (9.8 ft) tall and weighing perhaps in the range of 350 to 500 kg (770 to 1,100 lb),and was at the time the world's largest known bird.

I will be posting some of my homework to Scraps.