In the 1980s, paleontologists at the University of California Riverside visited Seymour Island on the Antarctic Peninsula. Among the fossils found and taken back to the states were a foot bone and partial jaw bone of two prehistoric birds.
Seemingly forgotten, the fossils sat in a museum at the University of California Berkeley -- until 2015 when a graduate student named Peter Kloess decided to take on the mystery of these fossils.
In a study published Monday in the journal Scientific Reports, Kloess identified the birds as pelagornithids, a group of predators that roamed the Earth’s southern oceans for at least 60 million years, according to a report by CNN.
They are known as “bony-toothed” birds because of the bony projections on their jaws that resembled sharp-pointed teeth. These long beaks helped them grab fish and squid from the ocean.
The birds were estimated to be huge, with wingspans measuring up to 21 feet – indicating that these birds may be the biggest birds ever to live, the study surmises.
To put it into perspective, the largest known wingspan of any living bird currently is 12-feet, belonging to the wandering albatross. This species is found across the Southern Ocean, including Antarctic, sub-Antarctic and subtropical waters.
A wandering albatross comes in for a landing off the coast of New Zealand. (kahj19, Getty Images/iStock)
The measurements of the fossils have helped researchers estimate the rest of the birds' body sizes. The foot bone indicates that bird was “the largest specimen known for the entire extinct group of pelagornithids,” while the bird that the jaw bone came from was likely “as big, if not bigger, than the largest known skeletons of the bony-toothed bird group” found before these fossils.
“These Antarctic fossils likely represent the largest flying birds of the Eocene period,” according to the study. The Eocene period lasted from 56.5 to 35.4 million years ago.
Kloess and other researchers determined that the foot bone dates back 50 million years, and the jaw bone is around 40 million years old -- evidence that the birds emerged in the Cenozoic Era, after an asteroid struck Earth and wiped out nearly all dinosaurs.
“The extreme, giant size of these extinct birds is unsurpassed in ocean habitats,” added study co-author Ashley Poust of the San Diego Natural History Museum. She indicates that the pelagornithids traveled all over the world, able to fly for weeks at a time, over the sea. At the time, oceans were not dominated by whales and seals -- meaning there was easy prey for the giant birds.
Pelagornithids were the dominant seabirds of most oceans throughout most of the Cenozoic Era, and modern humans apparently missed encountering them only by a small measure of evolutionary time. At this time, scientists seem to have no single, obvious reason for their extinction.
Read more:
"bird" - Google News
October 29, 2020 at 01:22AM
https://ift.tt/2HzT4tu
Fossils found in Antarctic may have come from the largest flying bird in history: report - PennLive
"bird" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2s1zYEq
https://ift.tt/3dbExxU
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Fossils found in Antarctic may have come from the largest flying bird in history: report - PennLive"
Post a Comment