About 3 million years ago, giant petrels terrorized the skies and seas of the Southern Hemisphere with their deadly hooked bills and piercing eyes, a new study on a previously unknown bird species finds.
The discovery — based on a well-preserved skull and weathered humerus (upper wing bone) of the ancient predator from New Zealand’s North Island — marks the only extinct giant petrel species on record, the researchers reported in a study published Jan. 30 in the journal Taxonomy (opens in new tab).
The Tangahoe Formation, where they found the remains, “continues to provide outstanding seabird fossils and is becoming an important piece of the puzzle to understand the evolution and biogeography of seabirds in New Zealand and beyond,” the team wrote in the study.
Amateur fossil hunter Alastair Johnson discovered the skull in 2017 and found the humerus two years later in a different spot along the rock formation. The researchers named the newly described species Macronectes tinae, in honor of Johnson’s late partner, Tina King. “This giant petrel skull was her favourite fossil, hence the homage,” they noted in the study.
As the first distinct evidence of an extinct giant petrel species, M. tinae offers paleontologists insight into how its modern relatives evolved. Although the now-extinct M. tinae is part of the giant petrel genus (Macronectes), it was actually smaller than the modern species Macronectes giganteus and Macronectes halli, which also live in the Southern Hemisphere.
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The Southern giant petrel (M. giganteus) and Northern giant petrel (M. halli) can grow to about 3 feet (1 meter) long from beak to tail, with wingspans sometimes reaching more than 6 feet (1.8 m). Since scientists have limited fossil evidence of M. tinae, it’s hard to know exactly how big the bird was, study co-author Rodrigo Salvador (opens in new tab), a paleontologist at UiT, The Arctic University of Norway, told Live Science. But based on the fossils we do have, he estimates that M. tinae was…
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