Bullockornis

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Bullockornis
Bullockornis statues in Kings Park, Perth.

Bullockornis statues in Kings Park, Perth .

Temporal occurrence
Miocene
15.97 to 11.61 million years
Locations
Systematics
Land vertebrates (Tetrapoda)
Birds (aves)
New-jawed birds (Neognathae)
Goose birds (Anseriformes)
Thunderbirds (Dromornithidae)
Bullockornis
Scientific name
Bullockornis
Rich , 1979

Bullockornis is in the Miocene living species of flightless Thunderbirds (Dromornithidae) in Australia occurred and became extinct 11 million years ago. The only species is Bullockornis planei .

features

After the Stirton thunderbird ( Dromornis stirtoni ), Bullockornis was the second largest species in the group, was two to possibly 2.8 meters high and could possibly reach a weight of 300 kg. Drawings and skeletal reconstructions in museums, supplemented by reproduced bone parts from other thunderbirds, give an impression of the appearance of the birds, but are partly speculative due to the incomplete fossil finds.

In contrast to the other thunderbirds, in Bullockornis and Dromornis the first ( atlas ) and second cervical vertebrae ( axis ) have grown together to form a single bone.

According to more recent fossils described in 1998, Bullockornis had an extraordinarily massive, muscular head and a beak large enough to hide a football. The beak was, as in the Palaeogene , in Europe and North America living Gastornis , high arched and very large compared to the rest of the skull. The eyes were small. The head and beak together reached a length of half a meter. The Australian paleontologist Stephen Wroe therefore suspects that Bullockornis , in contrast to its herbivorous relatives, could have been a carnivore or a scavenger.

literature