Roc, also spelled rukh, was a mythical bird of enormous size, resembling an eagle. It is known mainly from the stories in the Arabian Nights. In these stories, the hero Sinbad discovers a mysterious dome the size of a house. He finds out that the object is the roc’s gigantic egg. The Italian explorer Marco Polo reported that the roc is native to the island of Madagascar. He describes a roc flying with an elephant in its talons. Polo’s roc dropped the elephant from a great height in order to kill it for eating. Ibn Battuta, a famous Arab traveler and writer of the 1300’s, also describes an encounter with the roc while sailing in the Indian Ocean.
