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Not long after the extinction of the dinosaurs, a new breed of giants was born: monstrous birds with a wingspan that extended up to 21 feet (6.4 meters) in length, about the length of a U-Haul truck.
These huge birds darkened the skies above Antarctica already 50 million years ago, a new examination of fossils from the continent finds. The new research reveals that very large species of these birds, called pelagornithids, were born less than 15 million years after an asteroid wiped out non-avian dinosaurs.
The new study was published Oct. 27 in the journal Scientific reports. It focused on a bone from a bird’s foot, collected on Seymour Island near the Antarctic Peninsula in the 1980s. In 2015, Peter Kloess, a graduate student in paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley, found the bone in the collections of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. As he looked at the notes that accompanied the bone, he realized that the bones came from an older rock than was originally recognized. Instead of being 40 million years old, as the label said, the bone was 50 million years old and much larger than other pelagornith bones found of that age.
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“I love going to the collections and finding treasures there,” Kloess he said in a statement. “Someone called me a museum rat, and I take it as a badge of honor. I like running around, finding things that people overlook.”
The bone was no longer neglected. Kloess and his colleagues discovered another pelagornithid bone from the same island and era: a partial lower jaw. Analyzing both of them, the researchers concluded that the bird’s skull would be 2 feet (60 centimeters) long. The animal would have been among the largest, if not the largest, pelagornith ever found.
Pelagornithids were known to be a very ancient group of birds. The oldest fossil of these birds dates back to 62 million years ago. However, that fossil came from a much smaller species than the one discovered by Kloess and colleagues.
The newly discovered birds were more like today albatross, with huge wingspans that would allow them to soar for days or even weeks at a time over the open ocean. The modern day albatross, however, outperforms with a wingspan of 11.5 feet (3.5m). The 50-million-year-old pelagornithid would have had a wingspan nearly double that.
The beaks of these ancient monsters of the sky also had bony projections coated with keratin. These tooth-like structures, about 1 inch (3 cm) tall, would have helped birds cling to fish and squid collected from the seas.
Fifty million years ago, Antarctica was warmer than it is today. According to a 2014 study in the journal Paleontology, it was a haven for birds, including early penguins, as well as now extinct mammals, such as ungulate sparnotheriodontids. The great pelagornites probably dominated the skies.
“[T]These bony-toothed birds would have been formidable predators that evolved to be at the top of their ecosystem, “study co-author Thomas Stidman of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology said in the statement.
Pelagorniths probably boasted the largest wingspan of any other bird, followed by a group of scavenging birds called teratorn, which evolved 40 million years later. (Some pterosaurs had beaten both of them: Questzalcoatlus northropi, for example, could extend its giant wings up to 43 feet, or 13m.) The last pelagornites went extinct 2.5 million years ago.
Originally published on LiveScience.
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