Wow! The Bones of This 10-Foot-Long Bird That Has Been Extinct For a Long Time Is So Cool To Look At

This may finally answer some of the biggest questions we have about one of the largest species of birds to ever walk the Earth.

Transcript

00:00These are the remains of what paleontologists call Dromorna stertoni, or more commonly referred

00:09to as Sterton's Thunderbird. The species went extinct around 30,000 years ago, but even to

00:14this day it's one of the largest birds to have ever walked the earth. The creature is thought

00:18to have stood upwards of 10 feet tall and weighed around half a ton. Curator of Earth Sciences at

00:23the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Adam Yates says that there will

00:26always be questions about what extinct creatures actually looked like. But this find discovered

00:31in Australia is unique with regards to this bird, because all of the bones were laid out

00:35exactly how they were when the creature was still in one piece. With Gates explaining,

00:39we only got the lower legs because that's as far as we dug. There's every expectation that a large

00:43part of the rest of the skeleton, if not the entire skeleton, might be lying in the next dig as we dig

00:48further into the bank that the legs come from. Previous skeletal reconstructions of the Thunderbird

00:53have been composites of bones found from many different animals, which Yates adds there's

00:57a lot of variation between each one. So soon we might have a better picture of how to put this

01:01whole thing together and a better idea of what Sterton's Thunderbird actually looked like.