![]() The flattened nature of the rear face of the bone shaft, the orientation of several knobs associated with muscle attachment, and the size of several other landmarks all appear to be consistent with the idea that Lavocatavis was a terror bird that – when fully restored – could have looked an average-sized human adult in the eye. The recently-discovered bird is different enough from what has been found before to deserve its own name – Lavocatavis africana – but what makes it a terror bird? That comes down to the constellation of anatomical peculiarities on the femur. The suggestion that the bone might have belonged to a terror bird only sweetens the fossil find. Many of the other fossil birds found in Africa were birds which lived along the prehistoric shoreline, and the new species from the Gour Lazib site represents the oldest terrestrial bird yet found on the continent. In the context of what has been found before, though, the fossil is significant in that it’s from a land-dwelling bird. The specimen is little more than a nearly-complete right femur found in the roughly 48 million years old rock of western Algeria. Add the difficulty of finding appropriate deposits where such bones might be turned up and the fact that someone actually has to go looking for them, and it’s not altogether surprising that there is much we still have to learn about the birds which flourished in the wake of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction.Īt first glance, the new avian fossil Mourer-Chauviré and colleagues describe might not seem to add much to the overall picture of avian evolution in Africa. Birds are lightly built and their hollow bones are easily destroyed by the various processes which affect a body between the time of the animal’s death and when the bones are found. Part of this has to do with the rarity of bird remains. But this peculiar group of birds – technically known as phorusrhacids – was not wholly left in “splendid isolation.” At least one branch of the terror bird family tree, the appropriately-named Titanis, made it northward to stalk the grasslands of prehistoric Texas and Florida, and now a new paper suggests that these imposing birds gained a toe-hold in Africa, as well.Īccording to the new research published by Cécile Mourer-Chauviré, Rodolphe Tabuce, M’hammed Mahboubi, Mohammed Adaci, and Mustapha Bensalah, very little is known about Africa’s fossil birds between 65 and to 48 million years ago. Not every species grew quite so large, but, as a whole, these flightless, hatchet-headed avians came in a variety of sizes and were among the chief predators in prehistoric South America before the coalescence of the Panama land bridge allowed the formidable dogs, bears, and cats of the north to extend their reach. One of the most recently-described species, the approximately 15 million year old Kelenken guillermoi, was a roughly ten-foot-tall carnivore with a two-foot skull tipped in a long beak well-suited to tearing flesh. After the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs about 65 million years ago, the terror birds were the closest the world has ever come to seeing the imposing, predatory “raptors” of the Mesozoic return. ![]()
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