Big birds on Paleoworld

[Lightwaves@aol.com]

Hello  all,

Well, since there were no reponses to my last post, concerning '95 summaries
of discoveries and dig resuts I'll assume there were none:-)! Perhaps
RaptorRKC should ask :-)!

Recently we discussed, at lenght, bird-dinosaur relationships. Now Paleoworld
has aired an episode about birds that lived in S. America aprox. 40 million
years ago. These hugh birds were predatious and fearsome. Aside from the size
of these birds, much bigger than velociraptor, there was a striking
resemblance to raptors in the dino world. They didn't have the one huge claw,
but recent discoveries of the "wing" bones show another striking resemblance
with claws at the ends of fingered wings.

We also discussed the size limiting factors of flying birds, and I said I
didn't find most of the arguments valid. This same episode of Paleoworld made
mention of Argentavus, an extinct FLYING bird of prey with a wingspan of 27
feet! That sort of shoots down ( :-) ) the idea that birds can only get so
big. Heck there may yet be fossils of much bigger birds yet undiscovered.

Mainly I was struck with how much the skeletal remains of the large
flightless birds looked, to me, like a dino skeleton. If it were not for the
decidedly bird skull the rest could be a dino. IMHO this is another piece of
evidence that directly link dinos to birds. 

"and the flowers bloom like madness in the spring"
Roger A. Stpehenson
lightwaves @aol.com