I'd like to say this is a lifesize Harpagornis, but it is actually a lifesize Lord Of The Rings eagle. There is another one being ridden by Gandalf but I liked this one better. Note that it is not looking huge because of perspective, but rather because it is huge. The two people sitting at front left are in the foreground of the eagle itself.
How does the LOTR eagle compare in size to the actual Harpagornis? Would the real eagle have been significantly smaller? Have you ever seen a life-size Harpagornis model?
@DavidBrown Here is an extract from a very good program I watched a few years ago. It essentially recreates the (generally prehistoric) animals in the London Natural History Museum and creates scenes with them.
I couldn't actually find the actual extract, only how they made it, but hope it is helpful in roughly gauging the size of a Harpagornis.
If we take the program to be largely accurate, it had a wingspan of perhaps 3 metres at adult size. Therefore Harpagornis was likely 3 times smaller than the model above
@DavidBrown there used to be a lifesize model at Te Papa (the National Museum of New Zealand, in Wellington) - if you put the search terms "Te Papa Harpagornis Model" into Google Images you will see some photos of it swooping down on a Moa. I don't think the model is on display any more - or at least I haven't noticed it there in recent times.
The following video is about the making of the model, and you can see it compared to the people.An interesting snippet in the video was that they had to make wing feathers by splicing together other birds' feathers because there aren't any extant birds with primaries long enough to have been used.
