Giant “terror bird” couldn’t fly, but haunted an entire continent millions of years ago

Three meters tall and with a deadly beak were the biggest nightmare for mammals, reptiles and other birds in South America. But one of the largest known fossils of the species had a fatal fate, marked by a much larger animal.

Three meters tall, the forusracidae (Phorusrhacidae), better known as aves do terror, They dominated South America from the Paleocene to the Pleistocene period, when they shared their habitat with primates, ungulate mammals, giant ground sloths and glyptodons (relatives of armadillos with dimensions comparable to those of a car).

The gigantic bird, which reached three meters highshe couldn’t fly, but that wasn’t a problem for her: they moved quickly, running, at speeds of more than 40 km/hand fed mainly on other animals.

Their gigantic, curved and very strong beaks were capable of ending several lives by striking and tearing them to pieces: if they coexisted with them, they could easily end modern horses. They hunted small mammals, reptiles and other birds.

Here is a realistic specimen of a member of the terror bird family, exhibited at the Natural History Museum in Vienna:

The group of this species, which became extinct during the Ice Age, includes almost 20 species distributed across 14 genera and five subfamilies, and its closest living relatives are the seriemasSouth American birds of the family Cariamidae.

Fossils have been found mainly in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil and Chilean Patagonia, with some species also identified in North America, after the formation of the Isthmus of Panama. But a fossil, discovered in the 2000s in the Tatacoa Desert, in Colombia, dated back to around 12 million years ago and may have been one of the largest known for the identified species, between 5% and 20% higher than the specimens already described.

In this Colombian case, the bone showed marks interpreted as possible signs of bites from a Purussaurusan extinct caiman that may have reached around 9 meters in length, which killed the bird of terror, say study researchers at Papers in Palaeontology has .