Meet the half-tonne birds that lived alongside early humans

By MiNDFOOD

Meet the half-tonne birds that lived alongside early humans
Giant birds once roamed Madagascar, New Zealand and Australia. However, the latest fossil find, an intriguing fossilised femur, recently found in the northern hemisphere indicates much larger birds lived alongside humans in Europe.

These giant birds – flightless of course – lived in Europe as early humans arrived from Africa, scientists have today revealed in a study published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

Researchers unearthed the fossilised thigh bone of one of the feathered beasts while excavating a cave on the Crimean peninsula on the northern coast of the Black Sea. It is the first time such a massive bird has been found in the northern hemisphere.

The cave-dwelling giant birds were twice the size of a New Zealand native moa and weighed about half a tonne. They are thought to be a first for the northern hemisphere.

The extinct animal, dubbed Pachystruthio dmanisensis, weighed in at a whopping 990 pounds—almost three times as much as its closest living relative, the ostrich.

The discovery was made along with other fossils, including bison bones, that helped researchers date the now-extinct giant bird to between 1.5 million and 2 million years ago.

A palaeontologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, and study author, Nikita Zelenkov, told the Guardian that no birds of this size have ever been reported from Europe. He originally thought the thigh bone must must be from a long-extinct elephant bird from Madagascar. 

“When I first felt the weight of the bird whose thigh bone I was holding in my hand, I thought it must be a Malagasy elephant bird fossil because no birds of this size have ever been reported from Europe. However, the structure of the bone unexpectedly told a different story,” said Zelenkov.

Similar fossils have been found at an archaeological site in Dmanisi, Georgia, which is known as the oldest human ancestor site outside Africa.

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