10 Prehistoric Predators That Hunted Early Humans

10 Prehistoric Predators That Hunted Early Humans Number ten: Haast's Eagle. Roughly six hundred years ago, when the first Polynesian settlers arrived on the islands of New Zealand, they stepped into a landscape that had never known human beings, and something in that landscape was already watching them from above. The Haast's eagle, formally described by geologist Julius von Haast in eighteen seventy-one and named in his honour, was the largest eagle that has ever existed on this planet. Females reached a body weight of up to fifteen kilograms, with a wingspan stretching close to three metres, and talons that spread to a span comparable in size to the claws of a modern tiger. It was not built for delicacy. It was built to kill large animals fast.