The fossilised jawbone is nearly twice the length of that of an ostrich, the largest bird found on Earth today
Posted on 08/10/2011 5:21:06 PM PDT by Renfield
An enormous jawbone found in Kazakhstan is further evidence that giant birds roamed - or flew above - the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.
Writing in Biology Letters, researchers say the new species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull some 30cm long.
If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.
The find is only the second bird of such a size in the Cretaceous geologic period, and the first in Asia.
The only other evidence of a bird of such a size during the period was a fossilised spinal bone found in France and reported in a 1995 paper in Nature. Sharing space
An overwhelming majority of the birds known from the period would have been about crow-sized, but Dr Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth said that a second find of an evidently different species suggests that large birds were common at the time....
(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
The fossilised jawbone is nearly twice the length of that of an ostrich, the largest bird found on Earth today
Dino-ping...
Make a wish...
Do you see what I see?? It looks like.....”Oh, no...I’m a lesbian”.
I’d consider living among dinosaurs, if I were a huge bird.
I’d consider living ABOVE them.
“huge birds lived among dinosaurs”
That doesn’t shock me, since in modern times, we have moslems living among humans.
Wing night at the Bedrock Pub
There was one branch of the dino family that became birds. Other branches didn’t. The bird branch was the one that survived whatever killed off the other dinos.
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks Renfield. 'Tastes like chicken' ping. |
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Yeah. The reason people with dentures don't chew Bubbleyum.
Oh, no...I’m a lesbian
One date with the bighead otta cure ya of that...
There were some really large aggressive land birds in the Paleocene, perhaps this line survived in enough quantity to reproduce rapidly. My theory is that after all the other bad stuff from the boloid extinction, another problem was that the ozone layer was severly damaged or gone for a while. Anything with feathers, nocturnal habits, living underground, hibernating in the mud, etc. had a better chance of surviving. Thus we have birds, mammals, snakes, frogs, turtles, alligators, etc., but adios dinosaurs.
I decided to Google the big bird issue and found this interesting link regarding the shift from few carnivorous mammals to higher numbers after the KT extinction. Also the large bird I mentioned was Gastornis in the Palecene, followed by equally large Miatryma in the early Eocene (illustrated). SC this is a nice link and might deserve a separate ping post.
http://www.paleocene-mammals.de/predators.htm
If you’ve got an enormously long time horizon, enough branches (harshly pruned or nimbly grafted as needed) and are comfortable with flexibly interpreted morphogenesis and physiogeny, presto you can ‘evolve’ anything.
You could also simply repeat “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny” a thousand times and then just turn your brain off.
The line is from the “Everyone Loves Raymond” show
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