00:04These are the remains of what paleontologists call Dromona 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 exactly how
00:36they were when the creature was still in one piece. With Gates explaining, we only got the lower legs
00:40because that's as far as we dug. There's every expectation that a large part of the rest of the
00:44skeleton, if not the entire skeleton, might be lying in the next dig as we dig further into the bank
00:49that
00:49the legs come from. Previous skeletal reconstructions of the Thunderbird have been composites of bones
00:54found from many different animals, which Yates adds there's a lot of variation between each one.
00:58So soon we might have a better picture of how to put this whole thing together,
01:02and a better idea of what Sterton's Thunderbird actually looked like.
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