Ancient Bird With Largest Wingspan Yet Discovered 55
sciencehabit writes Fossils unearthed at a construction project in South Carolina belong to a bird with the largest wingspan ever known, according to a new study. The animal measured 6.4 meters from wingtip to wingtip, about the length of a 10-passenger limousine and approaching twice the size of the wandering albatross, today's wingspan record-holder. Like modern-day albatrosses, the newly described species would have been a soaring champ.
additional info (Score:5, Informative)
It's called Pelagornis sandersi, and it lived between 25 and 28 million years ago.
Re:additional info (Score:5, Informative)
yeah because the climate 25 million years ago wasn't actually WARMER than it is now, with much higher sea levels, who knows what the weather was like... but the global average temperature was higher than it is now, with a lot less arctic ice...
so IF global warming causes more turbulent weather.... then if the weather is generally hotter than it is currently according to your very skillful diagnosis of the causes of weather patterns, being hotter means more atlantic hurricanes, which means it was doomed from the start...
I love armchair paleoclimatologists... but I must agree that YES it likely wouldn't be able to survive today, being much cooler, food supplies are very different now, i'm sure it would have a much harder time surviving in a completely different climate than what it was adapted to.
Let's Throw AC into the ecosystem 25 million years ago and see how well he survives too...
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I love armchair paleoclimatologists...
I love armchair climatologists.
Re:additional info (Score:5, Funny)
I love armchair paleoclimatologists...
I love armchair climatologists.
I love everyone. Give me a hug.
Hug! (Score:2)
I love everyone. Give me a hug.
hug!
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No wonder it went extinct (Score:5, Funny)
21 feet (Score:2)
That's 21 feet, for those of you in the States.
Re:21 feet (Score:5, Funny)
Unneeded... we are all well versed on the length of a 10-passenger limousine.
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If it was found in South Carolina then it doesn't exist, since there is no evolution there.
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the length of a 10-passenger limousine (Score:3)
Wow, that's like 50 Olympic-size swimming pools per micro-Wales!
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I'm wondering why people who write articles feel compelled to translate easily understood units into non-comparable units. Today it's a bird the size of a dinosaur. Yesterday, it was a subway car as unit of distance.
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Quit being so pedantic. It's obvious that they meant one of these [hotfrog.com.au].
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Today it's a bird the size of a dinosaur.
birds *are* dinosaurs.
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no they are not, don't get carried away by romantic notions of a geek cartoonist. http://xkcd.com/1211/ [xkcd.com]
Several major physiological differences are: birds have very light skull relative to body compared to dinosaurs' massive one, birds have no teeth or tail
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That's not really just an idea from xkcd. Modern taxonomists group birds within the clade Dinosauria. Also, birds have tails, even if they're short. The tomia of a number of birds are also very toothlike. A number of dinosaurs, such as T. Rex had all kinds of adaptations to make their skulls lighter relative to their bodies.
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Being in a clade (ancestor and all its descendants) of Dinosauria is another matter, birds are descended from dinosaurs but are not dinosaurs
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It all depends on exactly which definition of "dinosaur" you use. Many, if not most, modern palaeontologists consider birds to be dinosaurs. Even if you use the traditional definition of dinosaur that restricts them to the Mesozoic, there were birds during the Jurassic and Cretaceous, so you would be saying that birds who didn't survive the era were dinosaurs, but those that did aren't. Which would make it weird for any bird species that survived unchanged well past the extinction. Would that single species
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how silly, humans are not apes either. there are ancestors of humans which were apes, there are apes now that are unchanged for millions of years
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The hack is probably paid by the of word.
Heck, my dad had a 1971 Cadillac Coupe Deville and I had a 1962 Cadillac Coupe that were both nearly 20 feet long. A 10-passenger limousine that's only 21 feet long _feels_ like it would be pretty small as limousines go; more like four or six passengers if I had to guess.
Bad comparison is bad.
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Wow, that's like 50 Olympic-size swimming pools per micro-Wales!
Clod, that is a dimensionless number. Did you mean micro-Waleses per Nelson's Columns?
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No, I really meant swimming pools (volume) per micro-Wales (area).
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I agree it's a weird unit, but it kinda makes sense nonetheless :
It's the depth of the water layer that you get when you empty the content of 50 swimming pools on a surface as big as one millionth of Wales.
Photos? (Score:2)
What we really want to know... (Score:2)
Bones (Score:1)
Largest wingspan for a bird, not largest ever (Score:1)
A 6.4 metre wingspan is pretty impressive, but some of the pterosaurs were considerably larger. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quetzalcoatlus [wikipedia.org] had a wingspan of 10-11 metres and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hatzegopteryx [wikipedia.org] was about the same size.
Extinct? I think not! (Score:2)
Based on the evidence left behind, one of the bloody things flew over my car just this morning.
Yikes! (Score:1)
Wilmaaaaaaaaa!
I doubt the albatross. (Score:2)