struthious

stru•thi•ous (STROO-thee-uhs)  adj

Definition:
of or relating to the ostriches and related birds

Origin:
1773, from Late Latin struthio "ostrich", irregular from Greek strouthos

Related:
Related Words: ostrich

Sentence Examples:
• So large a struthious bird as the cassowary requires more extensive feeding-grounds and greater seclusion than was to be found in any island of the Banda Group, and, as at the present day so in the past, Ceram was the true home of the Malayan cassowary, which found and which finds in the extensive forests of that island the home adapted to its requirements.  -Essays on early ornithology and kindred, James R. McClymont

• The bones, of which I have received the casts, are three in number, and of great interest. One of them is a characteristic fragment of the upper part of a fibula; the other two, still more interesting, as enabling us to determine the class and genus of the animal to which they belong, exhibit the extremities of the right and left tarso-metatarsal bones. The former is somewhat broken; the latter is nearly perfect, and exhibits the triple division of the inferior extremity of the bone into the three trochleæ or pulley-shaped processes of the struthious birds. -Remarks on some fossil impressions in the sandstone rocks of Connecticut River, John Collins Warren

• Vast struthious birds, which would have looked down with supreme contempt on the loftiest African ostrich, whose limb-bones greatly exceeded in bulk those of our dray horses, whose three-toed feet made a print in the clay some eighteen inches long, and whose proud heads commanded the horizon from an elevation of twelve feet above the ground,—terrible birds, whose main development of might was in the legs and feet, being utterly destitute of the least trace of wings—these strode swiftly about the rank ferny brakes, possessing a conscious power of defence in the back stroke of their muscular feet, and fearless of man or beast, mainly nocturnal in their activity, concealing themselves by day in the recesses of the dense forests, where the majestic trees were interwoven with cable-like climbers, or couching in the midst of tall reeds and aroideous plants that margined the great swampy lakes of these regions. -The Romance of Natural History, Philip Henry Gosse

Sources: Merriam-Webster

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