An ancient hulk of an eagle that once soared over Australia shares similarities with the fictional giant eagles from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic"The Lord of the Rings," a new study on the extinct raptors shows. While the real-life giants weren't as enormous as their fictional counterparts , they were probably hefty enough to pick up hobbit-size prey with their colossal talons.
"It was humongous," study co-author Trevor Worthy , a vertebrate paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia, said in a statement. It lived between 50,000 and 700,000 years ago and was likely the largest eagle on the planet at the time, he added. D. gaffae has a similar body shape to living eagles in the genus Spilornis, which includes six species living in Asia; the largest of these, the Philippine eagle , preys upon monkeys, lemurs and bats, as well as juvenile pigs and deer. D. gaffae and P.