Absurd Creature of the Week: The Murderous 10-Foot-Tall Bird With a Beak Like a Pickax

[steve2470]

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2014/03/absurd-creature-week-terror-bird/



You’d be forgiven for looking at a pigeon and straining to believe that its ancestors were dinosaurs. This is a creature, after all, that descended from some of the finest killing machines evolution has ever produced to now drink gutter water and assault old people for bread crumbs. But millions of years before birds were bumming for handouts in parks, they had risen right to the top of the food chain. In fact, they filled the vacated niches of their menacing theropod forebears like Velociraptor.

These are the terror birds: scrappy, powerful critters that drove their enormous hooked beaks through small mammals as easily as that guy who put a pickax through my crazy uncle’s skull in a bar fight that one time (he survived, and no, I’m not even kidding). The 18 known species, the tallest growing to a staggering 10 feet tall, didn’t bother with flying, instead opting to chase down all those creatures that had only just thrown their good-riddance-to-the-massive-carnivorous-dinosaurs party. The poor things woke up with a hangover, and the hangover was the terror bird.

It was 60 million years ago in South America, which had not yet joined with its northern counterpart, where the terror birds rose to power in isolation as apex predators. Even given their success, their fossils are fragmentary and extremely rare, according to paleontologist Luis Chiappe, who in 2007 described the titanic, strangely boxy noggin of the biggest terror bird ever: Kelenken, named after the fearsome bird spirit of Patagonia’s native Tehuelche people.

“It’s the largest known skull for terror birds,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s the largest known bird skull, period. It’s about two-and-a-half feet long, an enormous, colossal beast with a very big hook at the end of the beak like an eagle.”

[Squinch]

1. This is very cool, but I want to know more about the uncle.

[OnyxCollie]

2. Jesus rode one.

[1000words]

4. Nah ... The Savior was a T-Rex man

[Warren DeMontague]

3. THANKSGIVING II: VENGEANCE

[starroute]

5. The latest theory is that they were actually plant-eaters

http://news.discovery.com/animals/prehistoric-terror-birds-prove-vegetarians-can-look-scary-130829.htm

“The terror bird was thought to have used its huge beak to grab and break the neck of its prey, which is supported by biomechanical modeling of its bite force,” Thomas Tütken from the University of Bonn, who led the research, was quoted as saying in a press release. “It lived after the dinosaurs became extinct and at a time when mammals were at an early stage of evolution and relatively small; thus, the terror bird was thought to have been a top predator at that time on land.”

Wrong, according to the latest findings, presented by Tütken and his team at the Goldschmidt conference in Florence this week.

An early clue came by way of footprints likely left behind by an American cousin of Gastornis. The footprints do not show imprints of sharp claws, which would have been expected as tools to grapple prey. Today’s raptors, for example, sport such sharp claws.

Another clue is more obvious — the bird’s hefty size and build. Can you imagine Sesame Street‘s Big Bird (with a big beak) running swiftly after prey? All of that bulk would not make for a very swift hunter. Some researchers theorized that terror birds ambushed prey, but even that seems pretty far-fetched.