Our giants of the skies unearthed

A GIANT bird with bony teeth ruled the skies in Australia long after the demise of the dinosaurs, new fossil evidence shows.

Paleontologist of Jurassic Park film fame says it'll take one million dollars to create a 'Chickenosaurus' to prove evolution.

Yesterday Museum Victoria announced the discovery of pelagornis, a huge extinct bird that had previously been found on every continent apart from Australia.
The five-million-year-old bone from a sandstone boulder on the beach at Beaumaris, about 20km southeast of Melbourne, is the first pelagornis fossil found in Australia.

Senior curator of vertebrate palaeontology, Dr Erich Fitzgerald, said the bone belonged to the same species of pelagornis previously found in France, Morocco and Chile.


"Our pelagornis bone is similar in size to that of the pelagornis from Chile, which had a wingspan of at least five metres," he said.

"That is twice the size of the largest albatross alive today. So, we now know that there were once birds with teeth soaring over coastal Victoria with a  wingspan greater than the length of a Toyota LandCruiser."

He said the bone was from the lower half of one of the leg bones, "a  tibiotarsus, which corresponds to the shin and ankle in humans".

The pelagornis bone has a distinctive anatomy that Dr Fitzgerald and fellow bird experts Dr Trevor Worthy, from the University of Adelaide, and research student Travis Park, from Museum Victoria, recognised.

The research was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The team worked with artist Peter Trusler to reconstruct what pelagornis looked like.

"This meshing of  science and art has  yielded the most accurate depiction of these fantastic fossil birds ever produced," Dr Fitzgerald said.

Today in the journal Nature European scientists present new evidence that dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals like birds rather than cold-blooded like reptiles.

Previous studies had used lines of paused growth on dinosaur bones as evidence.

But this study shows the markers also appear in warm-blooded animals. Lines that indicate a seasonal slowdown or cessation of growth have been seen in the bones of reptiles and amphibians that correlate with changes in body temperature.