If ever there was a creature that deserved one of those awesome movie titles that is just beginning Attack the giant and ending with whatever species you’re looking for, it was this prehistoric flying monster that roamed the wilds of Australia about 50,000 years ago.
Don’t be afraid to start covering up Dromornis stirtoni. At up to about 10 feet tall and 1,200 pounds, it was the largest of the already flying birds known as dromornithids or mihirungs (an Aboriginal word for “big bird”), but his brain was probably the cheapest. . Very few dromornithid skulls have been found despite the size of these objects. Even without a lot of fossils, a new study has shown that the extinct Cenozoic birds had brains.
Spoiler: unlike the awful offer above, which shows how little we know about them, these birds had more flavor for the fruit of the flesh. They seemed to look more like this too.
Dromornithids are some of the largest birds to move their thunderous steps on Earth. Their large heads shouldn’t be horrible, but with their powerful beaks lifting so many buildings, their brains came into a cranium whose height and width went much further. Paleontologist Warren Handley, who led a recently published study Diversity, saw this wonder very close. Such a brain was far from a connected bird that in some ways – but not so different in others.
“The upper part of the brain, an area called the weakest, is greatly enlarged in dromornithids, but this area is much smaller than its relatives,” Handley told SYFY WIRE. “However, they have very similar features to the middle and hindbrain, as well as the shape of the nerves that bind to taste and touch receptors in their lips, with their relatives.”
Handley believes that the similarities between dromornithids and their surviving, galliform relatives such as chickens and turkeys, are evidence that the monster birds used the same parts of their brains in ways not too far apart. They were previously wrong for ratites. These flightless birds miss the roost that allow them to fly, such as the large extinct Madagascar elephants. Vorombe titan.
The appearance of mihirung brains was confirmed by CT scans that showed the bony structures inside the skull. The brain and nerves – as nerves enter the skull and brain through bony channels – could then be digitally reconstructed in 3D. This is what revealed that brains of D. stirtoni and his brothers were in such a strange shape. Virtual models of these birds-birds removed the main difference between them and their offspring, and also provided insight into their sensory perception.
Only brain bulge is found in birds. This protuberance, which acts as the human isocortex, associated with sensory perception, means that larger vessels in dromornithids are helped to see what is around them much better than chicken. any. They weren’t really weaker than chickens. Despite the sheer size of mihirungs, they posed no danger to anything but whatever they had unknowingly dropped. The Godzilla look is misleading because they weren’t really predators.
“We believe that dromornithids in particular used their large front eyes and good depth vision for detailed feeding on soft leaves and fruit in wooded environments,” said Handley. “They may have used a deep understanding to feed their chicks with their big lips too, and would certainly have used their excellent visual abilities to move through the complex forests in which they lived. to stay. ”
Much about mihirungs still haunts us. The neural biology is now being studied in more depth, and this is the first time a person has dislodged their brains. The problem is that there is a gap in the fossil record. Dromornithids date back at least 25 million years, and even their oldest fossils are so unique that they cannot be mistaken for anything else. So why do they seem to have disappeared for eons? Handley believes that the bones of many dromornithid ancestors have not just emerged yet.
“There must have been a long ‘ghost series’ of birds that came into the dromornithid shape that we know today, but which are invisible to us because they were not preserved as fossils, or, no. we still found them, ”he said. “Much of what has been discovered remains.”
Dromornis stirtoni he should still star in his own film. The last people may stop screaming after being seen going for a fruit truck when he gets hungry.