The fossil was on display in a museum, but unlabeled and hidden right under paleontologists’ noses for twenty years.
(CN) — Nearly twenty years ago, fossil collector César Perdomo was prospecting in northern Colombia’s arid Tatacoa Desert when he unearthed a massive bone unlike anything he’d seen before.
It looked to be part of an ancient species’ leg, but Perdomo wasn’t exactly sure, so the unlabeled fossil joined an extensive collection of petrified remains at his museum La Tormenta in Huila, Colombia. There it would sit for the next few decades, until a scientist recognized it as the lower leg bone of a terror bird, a beast that was once one of the world’s largest apex predators.
Terror bird specialist Federico J. Degrange leads a paper published Monday in the journal Paleontology that details the identification and how the subsequent analysis of the fossil revealed groundbreaking information about the monstrous creatures that were once the top predators in South America millions of years ago.
In 2023, when Perdomo’s fossil was correctly identified, it was big news that amongst his 5,000 pieces of fish, reptile, mammal, bird and plant fossils, there had been a terror bird bone on display the whole time.
But it wasn’t just any terror bird bone: it was the end of the bird’s left tibiotarsus, equivalent to a human shin bone, and the biggest one ever discovered. In fact, the bone indicates that the creature it was attached to was approximately 5% to 20% larger than any previously recorded terror bird.
To study the fossil, Degrange and his team developed a three-dimensional virtual model, using a John Hopkins Medicine personal scanner, to understand what the specimen could have looked like.
The fossil dates back to the Miocene epoch, around 12 million years old, meaning that the bird lived alongside car-sized ground sloths, primates, hoofed mammals and other extinct relatives of modern animals. It also is the farthest north a terror bird fossil has ever been discovered in South America, suggesting it was a key predator even in northern territories.
Closely studying the tibiotarsus revealed secrets of the bird’s life — and death. Tooth-like marks along the broken bone are similar to those made by an extinct caiman called a purussaurus. The giant caiman was a 30-foot crocodile-like reptile, with bulky legs and enormous jaws.
“Terror birds lived on the ground, had limbs adapted for running, and mostly ate other animals,” Siobhán Cooke, an associate professor of functional anatomy and evolution at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, said in a statement. “We suspect that the terror bird would have died as a result of its injuries given the size of crocodilians 12 million years ago.”
Cooke worked with Degrange to analyze the fossil and apply the discovery to current knowledge about terror birds and other ancient creatures of the same time period.
They say it’s likely that the terror bird got into a scuffle with a hungry caiman, just barely made it out alive and later succumbed to its injuries. The lands where the bird’s bone was discovered, now a dry Colombian desert, are thought to have once been flourishing with rivers, ripe with freshwater wildlife like the caiman. Knowledge like this is available thanks to the uncovering of freshwater fossils and evidence like a bone scarred with caiman tooth marks.
“It’s a different kind of ecosystem than we see today, or in other parts of the world, during a period before South and North America were connected,” Cooke said in a press release, describing what the planet may have looked like when the terror bird and caiman had their showdown. “It would have been a fascinating place to walk around and see all of these now-extinct animals.”
Cooke looks forward to future discoveries and suggested that there could be even more terror bird bones already in human hands. They just might not know it yet.
During its reign, the aptly named terror bird stood at a daunting five to nine feet tall, armed with a long, hooked beak reminiscent of an eagle’s. Its closest living relative, the three-foot-tall seriema bird, has a lot to live up to.
Millions of years ago in the Cenozoic era, the feathered creature roamed the lands of South American countries like Argentina and Uruguay, dominating the food chain after dinosaurs went extinct.
A National Geographic article on a 2010 Public Library of Science One study suggests the terror bird fought “like Muhammad Ali,” using its hatchet-like skull to repeatedly strike prey with “surgically precise jabs.”
Such an epic creature seems to have a niche following within the paleontology community, as studying the avian offers insight into the ecological roles and evolution of modern predatory birds.
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