Giant Bird Found in Victoria

Date: 28/06/2012 11:45:26

From: Bubble Car

ID: 170221

Subject: Giant Bird Found in Victoria

Ten of them flying wing-tip to wing-tip would cover the length of one Olympic pool, or just over two standard tennis courts:

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