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An Ice Age bird that weighed twice as much as an ostrich was adapted for the water, say a team of researchers who recently studied fossils from creature, which went extinct about 45,000 years ago. Based on bones of Genyornisnewtoni found in South Australia’s Lake Callabonna, the animal weighed about 500 pounds (230 kilograms), making it five times as heavy as the fearsome southern cassowary. The recent trove of remains, including a nearly foot-long skull, was found in 2019.

The only other known skull of Genyornis was found in 1913, and it was heavily damaged. 128 years later, the new fossils—and new technology—allowed a research team to make more detailed conclusions about the life and times of this giant bird. Their research is today in Historical Biology.



Lake Callabonna is “a bit of a megafauna necropolis,” said Jacob Blokland, a paleontologist at Flinders University and a co-author of the paper, in an email to Gizmodo. “This site has been on record since the late 1800s, but has likely been part of indigenous knowledge for far far longer.” “At this time Genyornis was thought to be a ‘struthious bird’, more related to cassowaries and emus, so subsequent reconstructions were influenced by such,” Blokland added.

The team’s research has shaken up those conclusions. The bird’s upper jaw was tall like a parrot’s but shaped like a goose’s (hence its ‘giga-goose’ nickname, as dubbed in a Taylor & Francis ). It had a large braincase and a casque, a.

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