Odds are, none of us will ever meet an Elephant Bird...but you can see the next best thing, at the Musée National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris: Bill Munns' full-scale recreation of the beloved ratite (the MNHN's Vorompatra webpage features an egg). Bill used to have a website that featured his sculpture, and I was fortunate enough to find it before it went extinct. He generously provided me with these photographs & an explanation of the process involved in the creation of his Vorompatra.

Bill: "I was heavily influenced by Burian's artwork. His several books on prehistoric life have been among my favorites since I was a kid."

"I finally got to my boxes of photos and pulled out a half dozen or more on Aepyornis, one of the full skeleton in Paris I studied as reference, some of the construction of the model, more on the head sculpture, and one of the full body figure with me beside it as scale reference."

"The head was the original design prototype. The head on the full body was molded from the first head. It's feathered differently because the head on the animatronic is cast resin, while the head bust only is actually the clay sculpture painted and feathered, so I was able to push feathers into the clay and touch up the entry holes. I couldn't do that with the resin cast head."

"The head bust was dressed out in natural hen ostrich plumes, but I cut the individual strands off the plume shaft and used them instead of the intact plume. It gave me a nice 'non-ostrich' look."

"The white 'stuff' is the same styrofoam used for 'snowfoam' candy canes, easter eggs and the white foam products sold in art/craft stores. I get it in 'industrial size' boards (6"x24"x96") and use it as a lightweight sculpting medium for large anatomical sculptures. After it's shaped and smoothed, a thin layer of clay is overlaid to sculpt the final skin surface. The sculpture is then molded, and a resin or vacuform cast is made."

"The six movements in the animatronic bird were beak open/close, head nod, head tilt, head turn, torso raise up/down, and (I think, it's been ten years) a lower neck rotation left/right."

"I'm 6'3". The bird was about 9 feet tall, as the skeleton was configured by the staff at the French National Museum of Natural History in Paris."

"The feathers are almost entirely ostrich plumes, and in stock dyed whites, blacks and browns. I wasn't prepared to try and do a custom paint job on the feathers. Since the full figure was an animatronic, I needed the full plumes to bridge the gaps in the underlying shell structure between moving parts."

"Time to do something like the elephant bird is probably 200-300 hours of labor."

"Actually, I'm getting myself out of this line of work. I just couldn't sustain a decent income with my museum work and the theme part business is ruled be the robotic animators, not the artists who sculpt and figure finish the characters. And the computer is stealing all the creature work from the physical creature artists. So I'm trying to change over to the digital side, eventually doing creatures there."