Antarctic fossil could have been the biggest flying bird ever, study finds

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In the 1980s, paleontologists at the University of California Riverside visited Seymour Island, part of an island chain in the Antarctic Peninsula. They brought home a number of fossils -- including the foot bone and partial jaw bone of two prehistoric birds.

For decades, the fossils sat in a museum at the University of California Berkeley -- until a graduate student named Peter Kloess started poking around in 2015.In a study published Monday in the journal"Scientific Reports," Kloess identified the birds as pelagornithids, a group of predators that roamed the Earth's southern oceans for at least 60 million years.

"Our fossil discovery, with its estimate of a 5-to-6-meter wingspan -- nearly 20 feet -- shows that birds evolved to a truly gigantic size relatively quickly after the extinction of the dinosaurs and ruled over the oceans for millions of years," Kloess said in a news release by the university."The extreme, giant size of these extinct birds is unsurpassed in ocean habitats," added study co-author Ashley Poust of the San Diego Natural History Museum.

 

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