12-foot bird lived alongside early human relatives, fossils reveal

March 25, 2020

The discovery, described today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, represents the first giant flightless bird known to have lived in 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.

“We think of [giant birds] in Madagascar, New Zealand, and Australia, but this is very solid evidence that they were also in the European region,” says Helen James, curator of birds at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the new study.

Fossils of giant extinct birds are quite rare worldwide, adds James Hansford, a paleontologist with the Institute of Zoology in London who is an expert on the extinct elephant birds of Madagascar. This find therefore adds valuable new information to our understanding of their lives and interactions with other species.

Clues from the landscape—and from nearby archaeological sites—also hint to the researchers that the flightless Pachystruthio provided a tasty treat for the early human relative Homo erectus. After all, hungry humans in New Zealand developed such as taste for another group of large flightless birds, the moa, they sent it into extinction within just 120 years of their arrival on the island.

The newly described bird fossil was discovered last summer in Taurida Cave, a treasure trove of ancient animal bones uncovered in 2018 during highway construction in Crimea, a Black Sea region currently in dispute between Ukraine and Russia. The bird’s thigh bone, or femur, was among the remains in the cave’s Hyena Den, so named because of its abundance of giant hyena bones.

Finding a single bone from this bird is unusual, according to the Smithsonian’s James, because you would expect to find the whole skeleton if the animal had died in place. A predator might have dragged the bone into the cave, but it’s tough to know for sure what happened.

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