This Bird Has Been Long Extinct and We Can Finally Take a Look at Its Bones!

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 Dromona Sturtonii, or more commonly referred

00:09to as Sturton's Thunderbird.

00:11The species went extinct around 30,000 years ago, but even to this day it's one of the

00:15largest birds to have ever walked the Earth.

00:17The creature is thought to have stood upwards of 10 feet tall and weighed around half a

00:21ton.

00:22Curator of Earth Sciences at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory, Adam

00:26Yates says that there will always be questions about what extinct creatures actually looked

00:29like, but this find discovered in Australia is unique with regards to this bird, because

00:34all of the bones were laid out exactly how they were when the creature was still in one

00:37piece.

00:38With Yates explaining, we only got the lower legs because that's as far as we dug.

00:42There's every expectation that a large part of the rest of the skeleton, if not the entire

00:46skeleton, might be lying in the next dig as we dig further into the bank that the legs

00:50come from.

00:51Previous skeletal reconstructions of the Thunderbird have been composites of bones found from many

00:55different animals, which Yates adds there's a lot of variation between each one, so soon

00:59we might have a better picture of how to put this whole thing together, and a better

01:02idea of what Sturton's Thunderbird actually looked like.