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.
Using the fossils' size and measurements, the researchers were able to estimate the rest of the individuals' size. The bird with the foot bone is"the largest specimen known for the entire extinct group of pelagornithids," while the bird with the jaw bone was likely"as big, if not bigger, than the largest known skeletons of the bony-toothed bird group."
"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 big are nearly twice the size of albatrosses, and these bony-toothed birds would have been formidable predators that evolved to be at the top of their ecosystem," said study co-author Thomas Stidham of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
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