Pachystruthio dmanisensis

Pachystruthio dmanisensis
Temporal occurrence
	Pliocene to Pleistocene
	1.5 to 2.0 million years
Locations
	Caucasus ( Dmanissi ); Crimea ( Taurida Cave );
Systematics
	Birds (aves)
	Struthioniformes?
	Incertae sedis
	Pachystruthio
	Pachystruthio dmanisensis
Scientific name
	Pachystruthio dmanisensis
	( Вurchak-Abramovich & Vekua , 1990)

Pachystruthio dmanisensis (outdated: Struthio dmanisensis as a giant ostrich ) is an extinct species of flightless ratites that lived in south-east Europe from the late Pliocene to the early Pleistocene.

features

Due to the very few finds, it is assumed that the bird reached a vertex height of up to 3.5 m and a weight of up to 350 kg. It is the largest and heaviest known bird species in the northern hemisphere . So far, birds of comparable size were only known from South America ( Brontornis burmeisteri ), Madagascar ( Aepyornis maximus , Vorombe titan ), Australia ( Dromornis stirtoni , Bullockornis planei ) or New Zealand ( Dinornis novaezealandiae , Dinornis robustus ), i.e. all of them from the southern hemisphere .

Systematics and history of discovery

The first evidence was found in deposits of the Old Pleistocene in Dmanissi , Georgia. In 1990 Nikolai Jossifowitsch Burtschak-Abramowitsch described the bird as a giant bouquet , Struthio dmanisensis, based on the thigh bone discovered in 1983 . In 2012, a second femur was found in the same place. Nikita Selenkow from the Russian Academy of Sciences and lead author of the more recent study discovered more bones of the large, primeval bird in the Taurida Cave in northern Crimea in 2018. Because of the few bones available, he and his colleagues do not want to decide whether it is an ostrich relative or another fast flightless bird and describe the species as Pachystruthio dmanisensis . All finds are around 1.8 million years old.

literature

Nikolai Jossifowitsch Burtschak-Abramowitsch, Abesalom Vekua: The fossil ostrich Struthio dmanisensis sp. n. from the Lower Pleistocene of eastern Georgia. In: Acta Zoologica Cracoviensia. Volume 33, No. 7, 1990, pp. 121-132 ( PDF ).
Nikita V. Zelenkov, Alexander V. Lavrov, Dmitry B. Startsev, Innessa A. Vislobokova, Alexey V. Lopatin: A giant early Pleistocene bird from eastern Europe: unexpected component of terrestrial faunas at the time of early Homo arrival. In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Volume 39, No. 2, 2019, e1605521, doi : 10.1080 / 02724634.2019.1605521 .
Abesalom Vekua: Giant Ostrich in Dmanisi Fauna. In: Bulletin of the Georgian National Academy of Sciences. Volume 7, No. 2, 2013, pp. 143–148 ( PDF ).

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Illustration of the femur on the pages of the Georgian National Museum .

[1] Illustration of the femur on the pages of the Georgian National Museum .