The fresh identify ancient bird Pelagornis chilensis is one of the biggest hiss ever discovered , with a gigantic 17 human foot wingspan and spiny , teeth - similar construction along its monumental honker that it used to hunt down Pisces and calamary .
Bird fossils are some of the most difficult for paleontologists to get their hands on , because bird bone are remarkably soft and fragile . This makes them poor candidates for fossilisation , and many bird fossils that do survive are severely crushed . In fact , the only other bony - toothed bird skeleton we had before this new discovery was a unmarried , mostly crush dodo .
That ’s part of what make the Pelagornis find so remarkable – it ’s 70 % complete and in pristine condition , giving scientists incontrovertible proof of its immense size and unusual teeth . describe in northern Chile , the doll ’s peachy wingspan allows scientist to better understand the physics of winged trajectory , facilitate them set an upper limit for maximal wing size .
There are , in fact , some birds with even longer wingspans , most notably Argentavis , another ancient South American shuttlecock read to have a 19 to 26 foot wingspan . However , the dodo grounds for this bird is much less secure than that of Pelagornis , as we have had to interpolate this wingspan approximation from very few last bones . Pelagornis , on the other hand , is the great bird yet that paleontologists feel certain really did have the wingspread these measure suggest .
[ Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology ]
PaleontologyScienceZoology
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