From the picture this makes m think that we are talking about when the poles were different and Antarctica was a continent. It also makes me wonder about whether Antarctica could have actually been places like the legendary Atlantis or Mu or the seat of another civilization before it was ice covered like now. After all it is a continent sort of like Australia or bigger under all that ice and snow so literally anything is possible if you go back far enough. For example, Alaska used to be more tropical and might be eventually again the way things are going. Another effect of climate change is Antarctica melting off and becoming a more usable continent maybe like Australia is now. However, where the poles are going to be then is another question too because they are moving about 40 to 50 miles a year (magnetic north and south now).
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A
sea bird with a 21 foot wingspan and teeth made of bone may sound like
something out of science fiction, but these behemoths were real.
Pelagornithids, or bony-toothed birds, were bizarre birds with enormous
wingspans …
Unbelievably Big Birds Called Antarctica Home 50 Million Years Ago
I write about paleontology, dinosaurs, and comparative biology.
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
The skull of pelagornithid Pelagornis sandersi (Image by: Jaime A. Headden CC BY 3.0)
A sea bird with a 21 foot wingspan and teeth made of bone
may sound like something out of science fiction, but these behemoths
were real. Pelagornithids, or bony-toothed birds, were bizarre birds
with enormous wingspans and extremely light bones—and now a team of
Argentinian paleontologists has discovered what may be one of the oldest
and largest bony-toothed birds yet in Antarctica. This new research was
published this month in the Journal of Paleontology.
Bony-toothed birds were quite the
cosmopolitan group between about 58 million to 2.5 million years ago,
living all over the world from Africa to Europe to Antarctica. Their
name is derived from the strange tooth-like projections on the edges of
their beaks—not true teeth, but rather extra growth of the upper jaw
bones that could have been useful for holding soft prey like squid or
small fish. It is unlikely they ate anything hard, as “teeth” made of
bone are not robust and break quite easily.
A life reconstruction of Pelagnornis sandersi (By Spiridon Ion Cepleanu, Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0)
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Marcos Cenizo, the director of the
Natural Sciences Museum of La Pampa, Argentina and lead author of the
study, described two types of pelagornithid that lived in Antarctica and
were discovered on the remote Seymour Island. One specific type found
had an unbelievably massive wingspan of 21 feet, which is the maximum
known size for this group of birds. “The shape of their wings allowed
them to glide and cross large distances across the oceans,” Cenizo said.
Not all pelagornithids were gigantic,
some had wingspans more on the order of 5-7 feet, but there seems to
have been two main varieties in Antarctica during the Eocene and both
were extremely large. In fact, birds in this group kept their giant
sizes until they went extinct 2.5 million years ago. They were able to
fly because their bones were pneumatized—meaning air sacs from the lungs
pushed into their thin walled bones creating empty cavities, making
them extremely light.
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For over 50 million years their giant
wings darkened the skies until their extinction during the last 2.5
million years when the world climate began to shift. It is unknown why
this mysterious group of birds went extinct, it is hypothesized
ecological and climate change robbed them of the food necessary to
support their large body size.
Shaena Montanari is a paleontologist at the University of Edinburgh. Follow her on Twitter at @DrShaena for the latest natural history and fossil news.
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