Giant fossil shows huge birds lived among dinosaurs (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

An enormous jawbone found in Kazakhstan is further evidence that giant birds roamed - or flew above - the Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs.

Writing in Biology Letters, researchers say the new species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull some 30cm long.

If flightless, the bird would have been 2-3m tall; if it flew, it may have had a wingspan of 4m.

The find is only the second bird of such a size in the Cretaceous geologic period, and the first in Asia.

The only other evidence of a bird of such a size during the period was a fossilised spinal bone found in France and reported in a 1995 paper in Nature.
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more: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14466814

[starroute]

1. There's more at Darren Naish's blog

Naish is quoted in the BBC article -- but there's a lot more at his own blog. (Which is worth reading in general, since it's one of the top science blogs around, and most of the entries are not as technical as this one.)

The picture below shows two alternative reconstructions, depending on whether it was a flying bird or a running bird, compared to the size of a normal bird of the period and a human.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/tetrapod-zoology/2011/08/09/say-hello-to-samrukia/

It’s not uncommon in palaeontology to discover isolated, even fragmentary, specimens that seem not only to represent new species, but also to tell you a lot of interesting stuff. Today sees the publication of a new paper in Biology Letters in which I and a team of colleagues describe a remarkable new Cretaceous bird, discovered a few decades ago in the Kyzylorda District of Kazakhstan (Naish et al. 2011). Represented only by the two halves (or rami) of its large lower jaw, this fossil provides new information on Cretaceous bird evolution and diversity, and perhaps on the composition of Cretaceous faunas and ecosystems.

[eppur_se_muova]

2. Thanks! Really I was only posting in the hope that ...

someone would post a painting of Jesus riding a Phorusrhacid.

[Vidar]

3. Not quite as big as the roc in Sinbad tales, but not bad.

[laconicsax]

4. In other words, huge theropod dinosaurs lived among other dinosaurs.