People attend in costume the 2022 New York Comic Con, at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in Manhattan in New York City, New York, U.S., October 6, 2022. (Photo by Brendan McDermid/Reuters)

Iranian visitors practice shooting with shooting simulators made in Iran at a police shooting simulation booth at the 19th International Police Security and Safety Equipment Exhibition (IPAS 2022) at the grand Mosalla mosque in Tehran, Iran, on October 20, 2022. (Photo by Rouzbeh Fouladi/Avalon)

After model Giulia Salemi attended the Venice Film Festival in a dress that looked like she had forgotten her underwear The Sun adapted a dress and Anita Kaushik 24 from Southfields went out on the London streets to share her experience on September 5, 2016. (Photo by Stewart Williams/The Sun)

A TV journalist reports next to a life-size cutout of Pope Francis outside the Catholic Nunciature before the pontiff arrives in Mexico City, Friday, February 12, 2016. Pope Francis is arriving in Mexico on Friday for a week-long visit. (Photo by Christian Palma/AP Photo)

A rag-and-bone woman stands next to carriages of a coal train outside a coal mine of the state-owned Longmay Group on the outskirts of Jixi, in Heilongjiang province, China, October 22, 2015. (Photo by Jason Lee/Reuters)

A five-week-old orphaned Southern Sea Otter pup rests on a rubber mat after arriving at the Shedd Aquarium's Abbott Oceanarium in Chicago, Illinois October 28, 2014 in this handout photo provided to Reuters on November 5, 2014. The stranded pup was found on September 30 on Coastways Beach in California and was rescued the next day to be brought back to health at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Southern sea otters were listed as “threatened” under the U.S. Endangered Species Act in 1977. (Photo by Brenna Hernandez/Reuters/Shedd Aquarium)

Two stags fight in a wildlife park in Aurach near Kitzbuehel, in the Austrian province of Tyrol. (Photo by Kerstin Joensson/Associated Press)

“Cassowaries are large, flightless birds related to emus and (more distantly) to ostriches, rheas, and kiwis”, writes Olivia Judson in the September issue of National Geographic magazine. How large? People-size: Adult males stand well over five foot five and top 110 pounds. Females are even taller, and can weigh more than 160 pounds. Dangerous when roused, they’re shy and peaceable when left alone. But even birds this big and tough are prey to habitat loss. The dense New Guinea and Australia rain forests where they live have dwindled. Today cassowaries might number 1,500 to 2,000. And because they help shape those same forests – by moving seeds from one place to another – “if they vanish”, Judson writes, “the structure of the forest would gradually change” too. (Photo by Christian Ziegler/National Geographic)