#odontopterygiformes

[vickysaurus-art]

Yesterday, an earthquake shook the narrow coastal lands between the Atlantic Ocean to the west and the great dry abyss to the east. A landslide allowed the water to break through the narrow strip of high land and begin flooding in. The incredible power of the ocean violently widened the gap and eroded the lowlands beyond, creating an ever growing chasm and the biggest waterfall on the planet by the next day.

With the very ground under their feet unsure and brittle and the sea rushing in ever faster, some of the local animals have fled to the top of a large nearby rock outcropping that will one day be named Gibraltar. The only ones who don't seem disturbed are the Pelagornis and other sea birds, who have discovered some aerial acrobatics let them catch the fish being swept up in the flood. Though even for a bird the size of Pelagornis, an unfortunate humpback whale is way too big of a catch.

The vast, dry salt plains beyond continue much further than any of the watching animals can imagine, yet a thousand Amazons worth of water will fill up the abyss within a year or two. In the process, the Mediterranean Sea, which had dried up completely a million years before, will be reborn.

[vickysaurus]

Pelagornis, a pseudotooth bird from the Miocene.

[alphynix]

Weird Heads Month #29: Giant Saw-Toothed Birds

The pelagornithids, or "pseudotooth birds", were a group of large seabirds that were found around the world for almost the entire Cenozoic, existing for at least 60 million years and only going completely extinct just 2.5 million years ago.

Their evolutionary relationships are uncertain and in the past they've been considered as relatives of pelicaniformes, albatrosses and petrels, or storks, but more recently they've been proposed to have been closer related to ducks and geese instead.

Whatever they were, they were some of the largest birds to ever fly, and many of the "smaller" species still had wingspans comparable to the largest modern flying birds.

But their most notable feature was their beaks. Although at first glance they look like they were lined with pointy teeth, these structures were actually outgrowths of their jaw bones covered with keratinous beak tissue. While these bony spikes would have been useful for holding onto slippery aquatic animals like fish and squid, they were actually hollow and relatively fragile so pelagornithids must have mainly caught smaller prey that couldn't thrash around hard enough to break anything.

The serrations also only developed towards full maturity, and the "toothless" juveniles may have had a completely different ecology to adults.

Pelagornis chilensis here was one of the larger species of pelagornithid, with a wingspan of 5-6m (16'4"-19'8"), known from the western and northern coasts of South America during the late Miocene about 11-5 million years ago.

Like other pelagornithids it was highly adapted for albatross-like dynamic soaring, with long narrow wings that allowed it to travel huge distances while expending very little energy – but with its proportionally short legs it would have been clumsy on the ground and probably spent the vast majority of its life on the wing, only returning to land to breed.

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[todropscience]

FOUND IN ANTARCTICA ONE OF THE LARGEST FLYING BIRDS KNOW

Pelagornithids, commonly called false-toothed birds were large seabirds, because their tooth-like points on their beak's edges.  Pelargonithids fossils remains have been found all over the world in rocks dating between the Late Paleocene and the Pliocene-Pleistocene boundary.

Argentinian researchers have analyzed fossils discovered in Antarctica, some recent and others found decades ago. Particularly several bones of one of these Antarctic birds exhibit higher sizes than Pelagornis chilensis (found in Chile) and Pelagornis sandersi (discovered in the US), the two largest pelagornítidos previously known. This could indicate that the fossils from Antarctica belongs to the largest pelagornithids discovered so far.

      - Pelagornithid  from the middle Eocene of Seymour Island (West                          Antarctica).

Researchers believe that between 50 and 40 million years ago, these pseudotooth birds in Antarctica were represented by at least two forms of different sizes, and apparently they would not have coexisted, but were replaced in time.

Pelagornithids were the dominant seabirds of most oceans throughout most of the Cenozoic, and modern humans apparently missed encountering them only by a hair's breadth of evolutionary time: the last known pelagornithids were contemporaries of Homo habilis and the beginning of the history of technology.

Reference: Cenizo et al. 2016.  Diversity of pseudo-toothed birds (Pelagornithidae) from the Eocene of Antarctica. Journal of Paleontology

Illustration:  Pelargonis chilensis by Carlos Anzures

[astronomy-to-zoology]

Genus: Pelagornis

...a genus of pseudotooth birds that lived from the Early Miocene to the Early Pleistocene. Members of Pelagornis were quite large with the biggest specimens boasting wingspans of 15-20 feet and weighing in at 50-75 pounds. True to their names pseudotooth birds like Pelagornis did not have true teeth, but sharp beak projections which likely aided them in catching large slippery fish. Pelagornis likely lived a similar lifestyle to extinct fish-eating pterosaurs as they probably roamed the seas catching fish and cephalopods mid-flight.

Phylogeny

Animalia-Chordata-Aves-Odontopterygiformes?-Pelagornithidae-Pelagornis

Images: Daniel Martinez Piña and Didier Descouens