Large carnivorous birds once roamed the earth. Now all we have is the fossils. But researchers can get all sorts of interesting things out of this. They analyzed the largest known example of the so-called terror bird to date.
That he is a fearful bird, coin the researchers from Johns Hopkins University, among others, on a leg bone of the extinct animal, which they found in the Tatacoa desert in Colombia, in the northern part of South America. This bird species has never been found in such a northern location before.
2.7 meters long
The bone is also so large that it may be from the largest bird ever found, about 5 to 20 percent larger than previous fossils. Phorusrhacidaeas the species is officially called. We know from previous fossils that birds of prey varied greatly in size. The smallest is 90 centimeters high, and the largest can grow up to 3 meters long. “Terrible birds lived on the ground, had legs adapted for running, and primarily ate other animals,” said researcher Siobhán Cooke from Johns Hopkins.
The bird’s bone was discovered almost twenty years ago by Cesar Augusto Perdomo, the curator of Museo La Tormenta in Colombia, but it was not recognized as part of a terror bird until 2023. In January 2024, researchers created a virtual model three-dimensional of the sample using a portable scanner, allowing them to further examine the bone.
Crocodiles
The fossil, the end of the bird’s left lower leg bone, dates back to the Miocene, about 12 million years ago. The bone, with deep recesses unique to all feet Phorusrhacidaealso likely showed teeth marks from an extinct caiman — Purussaurus — a species that could have been up to 30 feet long, Cooke says. “We suspect that the terror bird died from the injuries caused by the popularity of crocodiles 12 million years ago,” she said.
Most bird fossils have been found in southern South America, such as Argentina and Uruguay. The fact that one has been found so far north it is clear that the bird played an important role in a much larger area than previously thought. This fossil helps researchers to better understand what animals lived in this area 12 million years ago. They believe that the area, which is now a desert, was once full of meandering rivers. This large bird lived with primates, ungulates, giant sloths and glyptodonts, animals with huge armor the size of a car. Today in South America there is still the Seriema, a bird about 90 centimeters high with long legs, which is considered a modern relative of the terrorist bird.
A very different ecosystem
“In the time before South and North America were connected, there was a very different ecosystem than today,” explained Cooke. This fossil is believed to be the first of its kind in this location, indicating that the species was very rare in the animal kingdom 12 million years ago. “It is possible that the existing collections contain fossils that have not yet been identified as raptors because the bones are not as distinctive as the leg we found,” she continues.
For Cooke, this discovery helps create a picture of an environment that no longer occurs in nature. “It would have been really interesting to walk around and see these animals that are now extinct,” she says.
The terrorist bird
The terror birds lived from 60 million years to 20,000 years ago and are among the largest birds that have ever lived. When dinosaurs went extinct about 66 million years ago, they became the dominant species in South America. They only had something to fear from saber-toothed marsupial predators. The terror birds could not fly and had relatively large heads. The largest specimens could grow up to 3 meters in length, and the smallest species were almost 70 centimeters.
2024-11-04 07:32:00
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