A Maori legend about a giant, man-eating bird has been confirmed by scientists. Te Hokioi was a huge black-and-white predator with a red crest and yellow-green tinged wingtips, in an account given to Sir George Gray, an early governor of New Zealand. It was said to be named after its cry and to have “raced the hawk to the heavens”. Scientists now think the stories handed down by word of mouth and depicted in rock drawings refer to Haast’s eagle, a raptor that became extinct just 500 years ago, say the authors of a study in The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Haast’s eagle (Harpagornis moorei) was discovered in swamp deposits by Sir Julius von Haast in the 1870s. But it was at first thought to be a scavenger because its bill was similar to a vulture’s with hoods over its nostrils to stop flesh blocking its air passages as it rooted around inside carcasses.

But a re-examination of skeletons using modern technology, including CAT scans, by researchers at Canterbury Museum in Christchurch and the University of New South Wales in Australia showed it had a strong enough pelvis to support a killing blow as it dived at speeds of up to 80kph.

With a wingspan of up to three metres and weighing 18kg, the female was twice as big as the largest living eagle, the Steller’s sea eagle. And the bird’s talons were as big as a tiger’s claws. “It was certainly capable of swooping down and taking a child,” said Paul Scofield, the curator of vertebrate zoology at the Canterbury Museum. “They had the ability to not only strike with their talons but to close the talons and put them through quite solid objects such as a pelvis. It was designed as a killing machine.”

Its main prey would have been moa, flightless birds which grew to as much as 250kg and 2.5 metres tall. “In some fossil sites, moa bones have been found with signs of eagle predation,” Dr Scofield said.

New Zealand has no native land mammals because it became isolated from other land masses in the Cretaceous, more than 65 million years ago. As a result, birds filled niches usually populated by large mammals such as deer and cattle. “Haast’s eagle wasn’t just the equivalent of a giant predatory bird,” said Dr Scofield. “It was the equivalent of a lion.” The eagle is thought to have died out after the arrival, 1,000 years ago, of humans, who exterminated the giant moa. The latest study shows it was a recent immigrant to the islands, related to the little eagle (Aquila morphnoides) an Australian bird weighing less than 1kg.

Remains of Haast’s eagles are rare because there never were many. They lived only on New Zealand’s South Island, with probably not more than 1,000 breeding pairs at any one time.

It is more than 1,000ft high, but so unobtrusive that most people in the UK never even realised it existed, let alone that it held a European record. Now, Belmont Transmitting Station, one mile west of the quiet village of Donington on Bain, is about to divest itself of the only thing that made it notable. 

The tower has dominated the skyline of the Lincolnshire Wolds for almost half a century, delivering television signals to viewers as far away as Doncaster. It is the tallest structure in the UK, and also claims for Britain the title of tallest structure in the European Union. But not for much longer.

The 387.75m (1,272ft) tubular steel tower is about to lose its record. Not because anyone is building a bigger one, but because its owner, the telecoms company Arqiva, plans to shorten it by 36m when a new digital aerial is installed in the autumn.

The height reduction will hand the title to the American military’s 370m Torreta de Guardamar radio mast in Spain, followed by towers in Germany and Latvia. Britain’s tallest structure will then be the 365m TV transmitter in Skelton, Cumbria, with Belmont slipping to 14th in the EU tower stakes.

Attempts by a handful of locals to stir up pride in the tower have failed. English Heritage refused to list it and planning approval for the change was granted last month despite two objections. A bemused Bruce Randall, an Arqiva spokesman, said: “Usually we get complaints when we try to make masts taller.”

Some 50 tall transmission towers dot the British landscape, plus more than 1,000 shorter repeater stations. But Belmont has never been much of a tourist attraction. Indeed, its very unobtrusiveness seems to have sealed its fate in the end.

Rejecting the bid to keep Belmont, a spokesperson for English Heritage said: “Although the tower may be of local interest, there are a large number of transmitters in operation in Britain, some of them listed, which have greater architectural quality, evidence of structural or engineering innovation or historic significance.”

The tower has been appreciated by some. One resident quoted in a local newspaper said: “We have restoration programmes trying to preserve pieces of our history from early Roman to the present day: works of art are preserved; museums keep artefacts from past industrial ages; but what about our technological age? Lincolnshire is not awash with technological masterpieces – for goodness sake, keep what you’ve got.”

The last time the tower made the news was during a bitter storm in the winter of 1969 when its sister tower at Emley Moor, Yorkshire, collapsed. Most staff were evacuated from the transmission station at the base of Belmont as it leant five degrees to one side due to the weight of ice on its guy wires, but it survived.

The removal of the lattice section at the top of the tower and three of its 18 guy wires will not be a simple operation. A crew will have to climb up the core of the tower (there is a lift in the 9ft-wide tube but it will not be used) and a derrick and winch will have to be set up at the top. A helicopter may also be required.

The shortening is necessary because the new digital aerial is heavier than the old analogue equipment, and must begin lower down to prevent the tower keeling over.

The new transmitter is not due to take over until 2011, but Arqiva has left itself plenty of time in case poor weather forces it to delay completion of the project into next year. Tower-spotters are advised not to delay.

Their observations revealed a gigantic magnetic pump funnelling cosmic dust into the centre of the galaxy, where it piles up until it forms a ball dense enough to spark a nuclear chain reaction. Jane Greaves, the leader of the four-member team, said it was like having an ultrasound scan that shows how stars are formed in a galactic womb.

The galaxy Dr Greaves studied, M82, is 11 million light years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major, the Plough. It can be seen from Britain with powerful binoculars or a good amateur telescope.

M82 is going through a phase known as a “starburst”, producing 50 times as many new suns as our own Milky Way does. Dr Karen Wills, a researcher at the University of Sheffield, said: “It seems likely that all galaxies, including our own, have gone through a starburst phase at some point. So learning about M82 allows us to find out about the way in which galaxies have evolved from the early Universe to the present day.”

Until now, astronomers have been unable to see what goes on in other galaxies because their view is blocked by cosmic dust. But Dr Greaves and her team used the faint heat radiation from the dust itself to chart M82’s inner workings.

Their computer-enhanced photographs show a huge magnetic bubble, 3,000 light years (18,000 billion miles) across in the centre of the galaxy. Its structure is revealed by the glowing dust motes that have been pulled on to its force lines, like iron filings around a bar magnet.

The bubble is strikingly different from those seen in normal galaxies; spirals like the Milky Way have well-ordered, flat magnetic fields, or plumes of magnetic force lines spouting from their poles. “We were really surprised to see the huge bubble,” said Dr Greaves. “This is a new feature of galaxies that we didn’t know about before and could show how magnetic fields help shape the evolution of starburst regions.”

Exactly how the magnetic field was formed is still not known, but a near-collision with another galaxy, M81, is thought to have been responsible. Although galaxies can pass through each other without any individual stars hitting each other, even a close call involves massive tidal forces that can stir up the dust to set off a starburst.

Dr Greaves’ team at the James Clerk Maxwell telescope in Hawaii used a sub-millimetre camera called Scuba – which takes pictures in wavelengths between infrared and microwave – and a polarimeter, which works on the same principle as polarised sunglasses.

At present, the camera is not sensitive enough to pick out individual stars being formed, but a new camera being developed by the Royal Observatory Edinburgh will be 10 times as accurate, allowing Dr Greaves to see concentrations of dust just a few light years across.