![]() ![]() Up until now, paleontologists studying terror bird feet were unsure whether they balanced their weight on three toes or did so on only two, with the third held off the ground. By studying fossils from the Big Five mass extinctions, we can learn how life was able to bounce back and see what this could mean for humans in future mass extinctions. As much as they eliminate life, they also helped trigger the creation of new species. Melchor and colleagues named the tracks Rionegrina pozosaladensis after the geographic and geologic details of where the footprints were found.Įverybody thinks mass extinctions are a bad thing. Like bones, fossil tracks get their own names. The impressions match the foot bones of terror birds quite nicely. “I think terror birds are a good inferred trackmaker,” says fossil track expert Lisa Buckley who was not involved in the new study. It could have even been left by a species that is unknown from bones.Ĭomparisons of the footprints to previously discovered terror bird bones suggest the animal could have been as tall as five and a half feet, a big bird that may have been the juvenile of a larger species. Multiple of these vicious birds roamed South America during the time, ranging from small species comparable to the modern day seriema-the closest living relative of the terror birds-to giants that stood taller than an ostrich. Precisely what species left the tracks isn’t clear. A team of scientists visited the site in 2022, revealing the ancient steps of this fearsome bird. The tracks were first spotted by a reserve ranger named Andres Ulloa, who alerted Melchor to the find. “This means that the footprints are being destroyed slowly,” says Ricardo Melchor, lead study author and a paleontologist with the National University of La Pampa in Argentina. The rock layers containing the prints are submerged by the tides twice daily. Found along the Atlantic shore in the Río Negro Formation of Patagonian Argentina, they were not easy to spot. The tracks, described recently in Scientific Reports, are the first definitive terror bird footprints. The six-million-years-old prints hint that some of these giant birds kicked at their prey and pinned it down, similar to the tactic of earlier dinosaurs like Velociraptor. Now, thanks to newly discovered terror bird footprints, paleontologists have a better idea of how these hunters caught their prey in the first place. ![]() These flightless avians, some of which stood more than 10-feet-tall, strutted over the wide prehistoric planes, chasing down prey and tearing off chunks with deep, hooked beaks. ![]() Birds, feathered dinosaurs that have thrived since the Jurassic, survived-and some of these birds were more terrifyingly dinosaur-like than others.īetween 53 million and 18,000 years ago, carnivores known as terror birds stalked the grasslands of South America. When a large asteroid hit Earth 66 million years ago, not all the dinosaurs went extinct. ![]()
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