Brontornis Pronunciation

Fun Facts

• ✓Brontornis may have weighed around 350 kilograms, which would make it heavier than the more famous terror bird Titanis and potentially the heaviest bird in all of Earth's history.
• ✓For over a century scientists thought Brontornis was a phorusrhacid terror bird, but research published in 2005 by Federico Degrange and colleagues suggested it might actually be more closely related to ducks and geese than to any flesh-ripping predator.
• ✓The name Brontornis was coined by paleontologist Florentino Ameghino in 1891, the same legendary Argentine scientist who discovered hundreds of South American prehistoric species and was once wrongly convinced humans originated in South America.
• ✓Brontornis lived during the Miocene epoch in Patagonia at a time when South America was still an island continent completely cut off from North America, meaning its evolutionary story unfolded in total isolation from the rest of the world's wildlife.
• ✓If Brontornis was indeed related to waterfowl as some scientists now believe, it would mean that the ancestors of ducks and geese once produced a half-ton killing machine, which is arguably the most metal fact in the entire history of bird evolution.