Maori legend of man-eating bird is true

That isn't a new discovery either. I've spent a great deal of time studying New Zealand and Māori culture and history specifically (so much that I actually changed my keyboard layout to Māori so I could write in the language)... this is old news. Like, generations old.

Edit:

Here's my fairly old page about this very topic: http://kotiro.petermichaud.com/research/mythical-creatures/p...

They have a legend about the "Pouakai" that people have thought for a long time was the eagle. That old link proves this is old news (or maybe I broke the story first without realizing 8)

I that's the case the headline should mention that, or they should be clearer in the article about what this means for our understanding of the bird. The article seemed to suggest that the Haast's eagle was a recent discovery.

Sure. But evolution prefers to reuse rather then innovate, this can often lead to interesting limits. For example, we still have a blind spot where the optic nerve connects to the retina, in all this time we have not evolved a blind spot free eye. Thus I was wondering if there are some odd limitations in how big, how quickly a little eagle can evolve, vs what the giant raptors could do. It was basically evolutionary fan.fic.