Giant 500-pound prehistoric geese once roamed Australian outback, experts reveal after discovering ‘thunderbird’ skull
TERRIFYING 500-pound prehistoric geese once roamed the Australian outback, according to experts.
Scientists recently discovered a huge “thunderbird” skull belonging to one of the creatures – which are fives times as heavy as an emu.
They believe finding the Genyornis newtoni – aka “Giga-Goose” – skull will give them insight into what the flightless bird looked like.
The “stunningly rare” 32cm fossil was found in 2019 on the dry beds of Lake Callabonnamis and is thought to be around 45,000- to 50,000-years old.
Thousands of creatures were killed when they became stuck in the river bank’s thick mud.
Lead author of the study, Dr Phoebe McInerney, of Flinders University, Adelaide, said: “Realising it was an intact skull was just so satisfying.”
She added: “I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, this is amazing – we actually found one’.
“The Genyornis has been known [about] for 128 years – and now we’ve actually got a skull for it.”
The only other known skull for this species, reported on in 1913, was heavily damaged and had only a small amount of the original bone, so little could be gleaned from it.
The author wrote: “Genyornis newtoni had a tall and mobile upper jaw like that of a parrot but shaped like a goose, a wide gape, strong bite force, and the ability to crush soft plants and fruit on the roof of their mouth.”
Parts of the well-preserved skull also had some similarities to the existing breeds of goose such as South American screamers and the Australian Magpie goose.
“The exact relationships of Genyornis within this group have been complicated to unravel, however, with this new skull we have started to piece together the puzzle which shows, simply put, this species to be a giant goose,” added Phoebe.
According to study co-author and Flinders University vertebrate paleontologist Trevor Worthy, this fossil of the upper bill particularly helped them “put a face on this bird, one very different to any other bird, yet like a goose.”
It comes as scientists discovered a new spider species – and the animals are looking for their next meal.
Dubbed Whitsunday hinterland pelican spiders, these creatures are a “bizarre group” of predators found in Australia, according to a brand new study.
Over the past year, Australian researchers visited Conway National Park in Whitsunday, Queensland, several times to survey local wildlife and search for pelican spiders, also known as Austrarchaea.
Pelican spiders, which are sometimes referred to as “assassin spiders,” feed on other creatures by capturing and manipulating them with their “long, spear-like” legs, according to a study published on May 14 in the peer-reviewed Australian Journal of Taxonomy.
How dinasours become birds
Modern birds came from a group of two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods, according to Scientific American.
The theropods most closely related to avians generally weighed between 100 and 500 pounds — giants compared to most modern birds having large snouts and big teeth.
For decades scientists only fossil link between birds and dinosaurs was archaeopteryx, a hybrid creature with feathered wings but with the teeth and long bony tail of a dinosaur.
These animals appeared to have acquired their birdlike features — feathers, wings and flight — in just 10 million years.
Michael Benton, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England said: “Archaeopteryx seemed to emerge fully fledged with the characteristics of modern birds,”
To help explain this complex process scientists evoked a theory often referred to as “hopeful monsters.”
According to this idea, major evolutionary leaps require large-scale genetic changes that are different from the routine changes within a species.
It is believed that only such substantial alterations on a short timescale could account for the sudden transformation from a 300-pound theropod to the sparrow-sized bird.
But it has become increasingly clear that the story of how dinosaurs begat birds is much more subtle.
Discoveries have shown that bird-specific features like feathers began to emerge long before the evolution of birds, suggesting that birds simply adapted a number of pre-existing features to a new use.
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