Researchers Discover Fossils Of A New Species Of Terror Bird

Excerpt from huffingtonpost.com 
 
An army of huge carnivorous “terror birds”

— some as big as 10 feet tall — ruled South America for tens of

millions of years before going extinct some 2.5 million years ago.

Now, with the discovery of a new species of terror bird called Llallawavis scagliai, paleontologists are gaining fresh insight into this fearsome family of top predators.

More

than 90 percent of the bird’s fossilized skeleton was unearthed in

northeastern Argentina in 2010, making it the most complete terror bird

specimen ever found. 

“It’s rare to find such a complete fossil

of anything, let alone a bird,” Dr. Lawrence Witmer, an Ohio University

paleontologist who wasn’t involved in the new research, told Science

magazine. “This is a very exciting find.”

Skeleton of Llallawavis scagliai on display at the Lorenzo Scaglia

Municipal Museum of Natural Sciences in Mar del Plata, Argentina.

Preserved skeleton of Llallawavis scagliai. Bones colored in gray were missing in the specimen. Scale bar equals 0.1 m.

Llallawavis

likely lived around 3.5 million years ago, near the end of terror

birds’ reign, according to the researchers. It stood about four feet

tall and weighed about 40 pounds.

“The discovery of this species reveals that terror birds were more diverse

in the Pliocene than previously thought,” Dr. Federico Degrange, a

researcher at the Center for Research in Earth Sciences in Argentina and

the leader of the team that identified the new species, said in a

written statement. “It will allow us to review the hypothesis about the

decline and extinction of this fascinating group of birds.” 

CT scans of the bird’s inner ear structures indicated that its hearing was tuned for low-pitched sounds, and that it likely produced these kinds of ostrich-like sounds too.

“Low-frequency

sounds are great for long-[distance] communication, or if you’re a

predator, for sensing the movements of prey animals,” Witmer told Live

Science.

The researchers hope further analyses will yield insights into the bird’s vision and other senses.

An article describing the findings was published online March 20 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

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Researchers Discover Fossils Of A New Species Of Terror Bird