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For decades, the fossils remained in a museum at the University of California Berkeley, until a graduate student named Peter Kloess began browsing in 2015.
The birds were huge, with a wingspan of up to 21 feet (6.4 meters). And the specific individuals the fossils belong to may have been the largest of all, the study suggests.
Using the size and measurements of the fossils, the researchers were able to estimate the rest of the individual sizes. The bird with the foot bone is “the largest known specimen of the entire extinct group of pelagornites”, while the bird with the jawbone was probably “as large, if not larger, than the larger skeletons. known from the group of bony-toothed birds. “
“These Antarctic fossils … probably represent not only the largest flying birds in the Eocene, but also some of the largest flying birds that ever lived,” the study said.
Kloess and other researchers have determined that the foot bone is 50 million years old and the jawbone is about 40 million years old – evidence that birds emerged in the Cenozoic era after an asteroid hit Earth. and wiped out almost all the dinosaurs.
“The enormous and gigantic size of these extinct birds is unsurpassed in ocean habitats,” added study co-author Ashley Poust of the San Diego Museum of Natural History.
Like albatrosses, pelagornites have traveled extensively around the world and could have flown over the sea for weeks. At that time, the oceans still had to be dominated by whales and seals, which means easy prey for giant birds.
“The large (pelagornites) are nearly twice the size of albatrosses, and these bony-toothed birds would have been formidable predators that evolved to be at the top of their ecosystem,” said study co-author Thomas Stidham of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. sciences in Beijing.
The studio also painted a portrait of what Antarctica might have looked like 50 million years ago. It would have been much warmer then, home to land mammals such as distant relatives of sloths and anteaters. Antarctic birds also flourished, including early penguin species and the extinct relatives of ducks and ostriches. Pelagornithids would have existed in this ecosystem along with others, potentially competing for foraging and nesting spaces.
“My guess is that (Antarctica) was a rich and diverse place,” said Thomas Mörs, a senior curator at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, in April. “We only found a percentage of what lived there.”
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