(Photo Source: weeklyreviewer.com)
This Is One Big Bird!
There are all sorts of birds, big and small, that roam and have roamed the earth, but have you ever imagined coming face to face with a giant squawking parrot? Depending on the type of parrot, these birds can get pretty big already, but in a fascinating new discovery of fossils, scientists in New Zealand have added the Heracles inexpectatus, a supersize parrot, to their list of giant prehistoric animals.
The parrot, estimated to have been as tall as a small human child, was discovered by Australian researchers while conducting research in New Zealand, according to a study published in “Biology Letters.”
(Photo Credit: MailOnline/Chirs Wayne)
The bones found are estimated to be somewhere between 16 and 19 million years old. Despite being discovered in a now extinct lake in St. Bathans in 2008, it wasn’t until recently that a graduate student took a closer look at the bird’s drumsticks, which sat on a shelf for nearly a decade, that she realized the bones had been misidentified as an enormous, possibly human-eating eagle.
Trevor Worthy, a paleontologist at Flinders University, figured out the leg bones are evidence of the largest parrot known to science — now nicknamed “Squawkzilla.” The research team concluded the flightless parrot weighed 15 pounds and stood about three feet tall. Research suggests the parrot survived mostly on lush, tropical vegetation that covered the region during the Miocene era.
By: Maytinee Kramer
