Terror Birds

What kind of predator needs no teeth to terrify its prey? The terror birds were enormous flightless hunters that ruled South America for millions of years, standing metres tall and built for a life of pursuit and slaughter. In this episode, Tristan Hughes is joined by palaeontologist Dr Steve Brusatte to explore the world of the phorusrhacids. What were these extraordinary birds really like? How did they dominate an isolated South America after the extinction of the dinosaurs? And what ultimately brought their predatory reign to an end? MORE Tyrannosaurs Rex Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1759820234?i=1000670274429 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3uxH3HHjSuEk0mHmjFU9k7?si=KbONGZsXR4S2F6e-Yj8Gkw The Rise of Mammals Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1759820234?i=1000663557843 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/33uckCUV0H1ojyFqxJM8b6?si=5dwKk2LZSyOTmzJkEfYCSg The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch here: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:47Speaker 03

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 1:54Speaker 04

  And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact? Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it.

• 2:00Speaker 03

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• 2:15Tristan Hughes?

  They are the biggest birds to have ever lived. Apex predators that roamed the plains of South America for millions of years. Mega carnivores that followed the dinosaurs. Flightless, yet monstrous. Scientifically, they are known as forest racquets. We know them simply as terror birds. So what do we know about these monster birds? What do we know about this prehistoric age where they thrived? When South America was an island, isolated from the rest of the world? And what ultimately led to their downfall? To their extinction? Welcome to the ancients.

• 2:55Tristan Hughes?

  I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and this is the story of the terror birds. Our guest is Dr. Steve Brissette, personal chair of paleontology and evolution at Edinburgh University, and the author of The Story of Birds.

• 3:23Tristan Hughes?

  Steve, it is so good to have you back on the show.

• 3:26Speaker 05

  Tristan, it's always a pleasure. I've always loved talking to you guys and bridging the science and history worlds and talking about the deep prehistory that I study as a paleontologist.

• 3:36Tristan Hughes?

  We love doing prehistoric animal episodes once in a while, whether it's the dinosaurs or from this period right after the dinosaurs, maybe not right after, but a few million years after.

• 3:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, and as we'll see, it still kinda was the age of dinosaurs because birds are dinosaurs. We could get to that, of course.

• 3:54Tristan Hughes?

  And these are the terror birds.

• 3:55Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 3:56Tristan Hughes?

  They seem and sound so bizarre to have ever existed, but they did.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  They did, they did. And this is really the lesson of the fossil record, that sometimes we find fossils of things that don't live anymore. We would have no idea they ever existed, but we have the fossils and the fossils are totally bizarre, totally wacky, sublime. The terror birds are a great example of that. These were birds that would have been terrifying. The nickname suits them. They were top predator birds. They were basically birds that gave up the ability to fly. They traded flight in order to get bigger, in order to grow to large sizes. They were bigger than us, not all of them, but many of them were. And they were the top predators in South America for tens of millions of years.

• 4:44Tristan Hughes?

  Not just millions of years, tens of millions of years. And I probably butchered the naming of it, the pronunciation of its scientific name in the intro. How do we say it?

• 4:55Speaker 05

  Oh, you're asking me? Oh my God. That was the one thing I was hoping you wouldn't ask. I don't know. So it's a name that goes way back. The Amagino brothers in Argentina, these were basically the family, there are three brothers, they were the founders of paleontology as a science in Argentina. They were immigrants, their family came from Italy and they established themselves in Argentina. One of them ran a bookshop, one of them did expeditions and explored and collected fossils and one of them wrote scientific papers about the fossils and they came up with this name based on this little jaw. It was just, you know, a few inches long. At first, they didn't really know what it was.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Now, this was way back in the 1800s. Okay, so this was was long before we knew a lot about the different types of dinosaurs and saber-toothed tigers and woolly mammoths and all these amazing fossils that we now know about. And so they found this thing. It looked like a jaw, it had no teeth in it, but they thought it was a mammal jaw that had just lost the teeth. The teeth had fallen out when it was fossilized and they thought it could have been something kind of like an anteater or, you know, a sloth or an armadillo, something like that, which makes sense because these kind of animals, mammals, live in South America. But as it turned out, a few years later, their mistake was corrected. And yes, it was a jaw. Yeah, it didn't have teeth. The reason it didn't have teeth was because it was a beak and it came from a bird.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  Now, as you'll see, I'm stalling, so I don't have to pronounce the name. I don't actually, I must say, I've never actually been sure of the correct pronunciation. It's one of these long words. I think it comes from Greek. I can't remember.

• 6:38Tristan Hughes?

  Forest, yeah.

• 6:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it's for us, a racids or something like this.

• 6:42Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, and so P H O R, you know, but there's a reason why they're called the terror birds because they're terrifying, obviously it's a great nickname, but the nickname is really stuck because the scientific name is such a tongue twister that it's so hard to pronounce.

• 6:56Tristan Hughes?

  Then we will stay with terror birds.

• 6:57Speaker 05

  We will stay with terror birds. I should have been better prepared.

• 7:00Tristan Hughes?

  No.

• 7:01Speaker 05

  This is why, so, you know, the book you mentioned, the story of birds, I think it's behind me there. So I have an old chapter on these, these things. And that's what I love about writing is that it doesn't matter. I don't record the audiobook, so I don't have to, I don't have to say some of these

• 7:13Tristan Hughes?

  That's for some other poor soul to do. Well, okay, so the terror birds, when are we talking? If they're apex predators for tens of millions of years, which tens of millions of years should we be thinking of?

• 7:24Speaker 05

  So as always with the fossil record, we don't exactly know when the very first terror birds lived, but we can say that the oldest fossils come from what's called the Eocene time. And this is one of the subdivisions of the beginning of the age of mammals, basically the time after most dinosaurs went extinct. So we're talking about probably between 50, 55 million years ago, we know there were terror birds, but those first fossils are really fleeting little glimpses. They are rare clues. There's just not a great fossil record in South America at that time. So it's likely they went back even earlier. Maybe they originated soon after T. rex and triceratops and the classic dinosaurs went extinct. That would have been 66 million years ago.

• 8:09Speaker 05

  But we can be confident, I think, that sometime between about 66 million years ago and about 50 million years ago, that's when terror birds entered the scene. And they would continue to live, to diversify, to evolve, to adapt for many tens of millions of years, more. The last ones went extinct really just a few tens of thousands of years ago, just, just before the very first humans reached South America. So we didn't cause their extinction, by the way. This is one, we're absolved of blame. This was a, a natural thing. We don't know exactly why, but there were big waves of immigrants from North America, other types of animals that came down when North America and South America finally docked

• 8:54Speaker 05

  together.

• 8:55Tristan Hughes?

  We'll explore that extinction part.

• 8:57Speaker 05

  We'll get to that. So we have, let's say roughly 50 some million years of terror birds. They only lived in South America, except, except for this one species that did make its way northwards across the Isthmus of Panama. It may have actually even migrated even a little bit before North and South America touched. And this one got into Florida, got into Texas, made his way to California, but it didn't last very long. So there was a rare American terror bird. We have other terrors in the United States of America. This terror bird never quite gained a foothold.

• 9:31Tristan Hughes?

  I'm jealous you've got terror birds compared to here where we didn't, but that's another story. But you also make an important point. So the age of the terror birds, the real time when they are really at the top, this is a time when South America is an island.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  That is exactly right. So think about Australia today. It's a continent, you know, it's a big slab of land, but it's an island. It's not connected to anything else. South America was like that for many tens of millions of years, 60 million years, maybe even 80 or 90 million years. So it used to be part of what was called Gondwana. That was the southern half of Pangaea, which was the single supercontinent. So Pangaea was around for a long time. Then it basically split from east to west and from north to south. South America was in the south. It remained connected to Africa for a long time. That's why they look like puzzle pieces that fit together because they did for a long time. But Australia was part of that Gondwanan continent. So was Antarctica, so was Madagascar, so was India.

• 10:29Speaker 05

  India used to be part of the south. It's only very recently moved northwards. Then that Gondwanan continent, it broke apart and somewhere between probably 70 and 90 million years ago, South America went off on its own. A large chunk of land, a continent in its own right, but an island divorced from everywhere else. And so because it was isolated, the animals there, the plants there, they evolved in splendid isolation, as the biologists like to say. So you get all kinds of wacky creatures living there that are pretty much disconnected from the bloodlines on other continents. And it remained that way until South America and North America made their connection.

• 11:12Tristan Hughes?

  So we set the scene, so it's South America for the story of the terror birds, largely when it was an island. So now let's explore kind of getting to terror birds and the story, that evolution story is so interesting. And I feel we should probably start with the extinction of the dinosaurs. So sixty six million years ago, what happens?

• 11:32Speaker 05

  Oh, the worst day in the history of the earth happened. I know, I mean that actually, I mean, it sounds hyperbolic, but I think it really is true. Because sixty six million years ago, one random day, this rock fell out of the sky. This was an asteroid. It was about six miles or about 10 kilometers wide. So basically a rock the size of Mount Everest or a rock the size of the city of Edinburgh, where I live. So you look at Edinburgh on the map, that's basically the size of this rock. It was hurtling through the emptiness of outer space. It was basically a leftover crumb from the formation of our solar system, a piece of space junk. And it could have gone anywhere, but it just so happened to make a beeline for the earth.

• 12:16Speaker 05

  And it smashed into what's now the Gulf of Mexico, very close to Cancun, the very popular tourist town on the Yucatan Peninsula. And it exploded, it detonated with a force that was bigger than a billion nuclear bombs put together. So just unimaginable fury. I mean, it punched a hole in the face of the earth more than 100 miles wide. And that crater today is mostly covered by the water of the Gulf of Mexico, but you can still see some traces of it on land. So this was catastrophic. This was the biggest asteroid to hit the earth in at least the last half a billion years. And it triggered earthquakes and wildfires and volcanoes.

• 12:57Speaker 05

  And all the dust and the dirt and the grime from that collision, the soot from the fires went up into the atmosphere. The atmosphere has currents like the ocean does. So that stuff spread around the world. And before long, the earth was plunged into darkness. It was a global nuclear winter. The earth went dark and cold, maybe for a few years, maybe for up to a decade or so. And that was the real agent of doom. Seventy five percent of species went extinct. If you were alive the day the asteroid hit, your entire species, a one in four chance of survival.

• 13:32Tristan Hughes?

  Really? And it's in those following years, months and years that the extinctions really happened because of entering that nuclear winter time period.

• 13:39Speaker 05

  That's right. I mean, I don't really want to imagine it because it's so grim, but I mean, imagine if the earth, the entire earth basically was dark and cold. There was no sunlight or very little sunlight that could get through. Plants could not photosynthesize, they couldn't make their own food. So those ecosystems on land where there were forests and jungles, they would collapse. And so the plants would die, the plant eaters would die, the meat eaters would die, you know, these ecosystems would collapse like a house of cards. Same in the ocean. The ecosystems in the ocean are based on what are called phytoplankton, these little microscopic creatures that also make their own food using sunlight like plants do. So food webs just collapsed. There was very little food to go around. If you were a big animal, you were in trouble.

• 14:23Speaker 05

  There just wasn't much food to eat. And if you couldn't hide very easily, if you couldn't dig a burrow, if you couldn't move away from the danger very quickly, you'd be in trouble as well, especially when there were the fires and the earthquakes and the tsunamis. And if you grew slowly, you'd be in trouble. Imagine if, if it took you, you know, many months to lay eggs and raise your babies. And if as a baby, it took you many years to become an adult. I mean, that would not be a good strategy for getting through this sort of destruction. So it's those types of animals that really died. That's probably why most of the dinosaurs died. T. rex, triceratops, the long-necked ones, they were big. They needed to eat a lot of food. They couldn't hide very easily. They didn't grow very quickly.

• 15:06Speaker 05

  So they had dominated the world for 150 million years. Now suddenly, things had changed so quickly, so profoundly, that they were on the back foot and they didn't make it through. But some animals did.

• 15:19Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, yes. Who are the great survivors? Who are the great survivors?

• 15:22Speaker 05

  The great survivors. So there were many victims, the, the, the big dinosaurs were among them, the pterodactyls, you know, those reptiles that were flying around over the heads of dinosaurs, not quite true dinosaurs cousins, but they died as well. All of those reptiles living in the oceans.

• 15:36Tristan Hughes?

  The mosasaurs.

• 15:36Speaker 05

  The mosasaurs, the plesiosaurs, they died as well. The ammonites, those beautiful fossils, they're so common here in Britain, those coiled shells, you know, there's so many of us collect, they died. But some things did survive, or else we wouldn't have life today. And one of the survivors was this group of small furry little creatures that could eat lots of different types of food, but didn't need to eat huge volumes of food because they were small, they could dig burrows, they could keep themselves warm with their hair, they could raise their babies really quickly, turn over the generations quickly. Those animals were mammals. They were our ancestors. So we had ancestors that stared down the asteroid. And again, if we didn't, we wouldn't be here.

• 16:21Speaker 05

  You know, our whole evolutionary family had to get through that bottleneck. But there were other survivors too, and some of them were also small, but they didn't have hair, they had feathers. And they could fly with those feathers, so they could move around quickly. They didn't need to eat a whole lot of food. They grew super quickly and they had beaks, which means they could eat seeds. And when forests collapse and ecosystems collapse, we see this today, if there's a volcano that obliterates an island or a big forest fire, seeds will remain.

• 16:52Tristan Hughes?

  Really?

• 16:53Speaker 05

  Seeds will really be the last thing that remain. So if you could eat seeds, it wouldn't keep you alive forever, but you would at least be able to eat the last surviving food. You, you could stick around for a while. Now, these animals, of course, were birds. And so it was probably because that hand of cards, that was the winning hand of cards, being small, growing fast, being able to fly, being able to eat seeds. Those were the things that helped them stare down that asteroid alongside our mammal ancestors.

• 17:19Tristan Hughes?

  So these small birds, we'll focus on the birds. So obviously mammals are there as well.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, we do mammals in another.

• 17:23Tristan Hughes?

  Another day, I think we have done it as well. But these small birds, they survived the nuclear winter. And so they emerge as, you know, into this brave new world. I mean, how do they then get very big? How do we then get to things like the terror birds from really small survivors?

• 17:39Speaker 05

  Well, imagine what it would have been like to be one of these animals that did survive, that you, you endure this nuclear winter for a few years or a decade or so. And then the sunlight starts to trickle through the clouds.

• 17:53Tristan Hughes?

  Must be quite something.

• 17:54Speaker 05

  It would be eerie. Look out on this devastated world, this desecrated planet. But this was also, of course, a world of opportunity. T. rex is gone. Triceratops is gone. Those enormous long-necked dinosaurs that would crush you with a single footfall, they were gone. So if you could survive, you now had the opportunity. And evolution, of course, doesn't like a vacuum and it will, it will fill that vacuum. If there's opportunity, evolution by natural selection will shape organisms to take advantage of those opportunities. So what we see is both birds and mammals start to proliferate. From those few survivors, you get lots of new species really quickly. And you start to see some of those species, yeah, they stay small and they stay doing

• 18:39Speaker 05

  what their ancestors did, but some of them start to do new things. They get bigger, they move to new places, they start to eat different foods and they start to form these more complex ecosystems where now there's a lot of mammals and a lot of birds in many different roles in the food web. And that is how we say the age of mammals started. But really, this whole age of mammals thing, we say it because we're a mammal, but look, there's over 10,000 species of birds today. That's about double the number of mammal species. So in many ways, we should be talking about us being in the age of birds now, or maybe even the age of dinosaurs, if, if we want to be really cute about it.

• 19:17Tristan Hughes?

  So how do we get from, so there's a lot of then diversifying of birds in that brave new world. Do we know much about the particular family line, the particular lineage that went to South America and started getting bigger and bigger?

• 19:33Speaker 05

  We know some things. We know that the birds that survived, we have fossils of some of these birds that are, they are right at the end of the Cretaceous, right before the asteroid. And some of these birds that survived were ones that were pretty small. They lived not in the trees, but they lived on the land. They were ground birds or water birds. And by that, I don't mean something like a penguin, but something more like a duck. And in fact, some of these birds were actually in the duck group on the family tree.

• 19:59Tristan Hughes?

  Prehistoric ducks.

• 20:00Speaker 05

  Prehistoric ducks, living with T. rex, honking around, quacking around, annoying T. rex.

• 20:08Tristan Hughes?

  So I'm just imagining Donald Duck now in, next to T. rex.

• 20:12Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, there you go. There you go. So, so these were the, the birds that did survive. And then afterwards, they were the ones that had that opportunity to proliferate. We don't have enough fossils to know every detail of that story. And this is true, especially of birds, because birds tend to be small, their bones are really, really light. In fact, most bird bones are hollow, they're full of air. You know, that helps birds be lighter so they can fly better. So it's hard to preserve something small, something delicate as a fossil. We do have fossils, it's just that we don't have loads of them. And a lot of times we need those really special opportunities where a whole bunch of fossils

• 20:52Speaker 05

  are preserved in the same place because of some weird contingency of prehistory where some volcano erupts and buries a bunch of stuff like Pompeii, that happens with fossils, or there's some lake where a bunch of stuff falls in and it has just the right chemistry to preserve the, the bones. So we're always at the mercy of the fossil record. So what that means is we don't know exactly which birds got to South America to become the terror birds. We know from the bones of terror birds that they are very similar to birds that still live in South America today. And these are the ceriamas. Now they're, they look nothing like a terror bird. They're smaller, but they live on the ground. They don't fly a whole lot, or at least they don't fly, you know, they're not ace flyers like, like some other birds, and they can be quite ferocious.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  So, so we know that these ceriama birds must have got to South America at some point, not too long after the extinction. I should say, we can build family trees of modern birds using DNA. You know, DNA, you use it like a paternity test. You can build family trees of animals using their DNA. And we can tell that a huge amount of the diversity of modern birds was established soon after the dinosaur extinction, soon after the asteroid. There was this manic blitz of evolution. And so it seems like probably within the first few million years at most, that's when these ceriama birds and their close relatives would have diverged from the other birds that are rapidly evolving. And then somehow they got to South America.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  And then when they were there, some of them then gave up flying, traded flying for being able to get bigger. It's really an evolutionary trade off because it's very hard to fly if you're big. I mean, it's one thing if you're an airplane. I mean, you have your fixed wings and, and, and big engines on it. But if you're an animal like a bird that has to flap wings and power those wings with muscles, really, once you get past a certain size, it's just not going to really work. So to be something as hefty as a terror bird, something that weighed hundreds of kilos. You couldn't really fly very easily with that kind of body weight. So, so these ancestors gave up flying, got bigger, basically supersized their bodies,

• 23:01Speaker 05

  became real true big birds and moved into the top predator niche in ecosystem.

• 23:08Tristan Hughes?

  Wow. And we're now going to delve into the anatomy of a terror bird right after this.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 24:03Tristan Hughes?

  Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

• 24:09Speaker 06

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• 24:15Tristan Hughes?

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 24:21Speaker 06

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• 24:33Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube. After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one. And I'm Carter Roy and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.

• 25:10Tristan Hughes?

  So Steve, that's the story of how we get to terror birds and birds getting very big in South America, an island at that time, giving up flight to get big. The biggest birds to have ever lived, is that fair to say?

• 25:23Speaker 05

  They weren't quite the biggest birds. They were among them, but there are some other weird fossil birds that are even bigger. There were things that once lived in Madagascar that were called elephant birds.

• 25:33Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 25:33Speaker 05

  Think you can see, these things get great nicknames. And they, they weighed well over a thousand pounds. You know, they were, they were something like the 700 kilo range. They laid eggs the size of watermelons.

• 25:46Tristan Hughes?

  Wow, okay.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  They were the biggest ones. And there were some in Australia called demon ducks.

• 25:51Tristan Hughes?

  Demon ducks.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  Which weren't quite as tall as an elephant bird. Elephant birds got to be like 10 feet tall. Demon ducks were a bit shorter, but they were heftier. Now, both elephant birds and demon ducks, though, were plant eaters. So we call them demon ducks, but they weren't really that demonic.

• 26:03Tristan Hughes?

  Right. The biggest bird predator.

• 26:06Speaker 05

  The biggest bird predator. There you go.

• 26:08Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, that's, that's my, that's my correction. Thank you very much. But yeah, let's, let's explore the body structure, what we know from the surviving fossils. So let's start with the head. So they trade flight for incredible height and size. I'm guessing the skulls are pretty extraordinary, pretty ferocious.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  The skulls are insane. And we were just looking at, uh, not a real skull, but a cast copy of a skull in the National Museum of Scotland the other day. I was just looking at it with my students and this, this thing is about this big. I mean, it's, it's basically the size of a horse's head.

• 26:41Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 26:42Speaker 05

  And, and, and it, at the end of it, of course, there's a beak. You know, these things didn't have teeth. They didn't have steak knife teeth like T. rex or a velociraptor. They couldn't, you know, birds don't have teeth. They, they've lost the ability to grow teeth. Actually, birds start to grow teeth in the egg, but then very quickly they're replaced by the beak. So what that means is if you want to be a bird and you want to be a predator, you've got to use your beak to, to, to do it. You can't just use teeth. And so these terror birds had ferocious beaks. Their beaks were hooked, big nasty hook, kind of like, um, you know, eagle or a hawk or something like that, but a much bigger, much sharper, much nastier weapon at the end of the beak in terms of that hook.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  And then the size of the beak are very, very sharp and the skull as a whole is quite big. It's very robust. Most birds today have lots of bones in their heads that are linked together very tenuously by ligaments and by muscles. So birds have a lot of movement, different than us. We have kind of this bit of our head and our jaw, and that's it. The bones have fused together, but not most birds. Terror birds have kind of done what we've done. They've fused up a lot of those bones so they could make their skull extra strong. So they could bite harder with their muscles.

• 27:58Tristan Hughes?

  It's all about the bite, is it?

• 27:59Speaker 05

  All about the bite. And, and there have been some scientists, uh, people like Dino de Grandje, Larry Whitmer, my colleagues, they, they study anatomy. They study what's called biomechanics, how animals, uh, move and feed and, and what they do. And they've run these different tests, mostly using software, you know, the type of software that engineers use to build, when they're building a bridge or building a skyscraper. You know, you don't want to just start building. You want to model it. You want to make sure the thing's going to be strong enough. And so there's software that does this. And these paleontologists, they've used the software and they've shown that these terror birds had really strong bites and that their skulls were really robust in order to accommodate

• 28:40Speaker 05

  that bite, you know, so the skull didn't break apart in order to give us a proper scaffold for the muscles. And probably, and this is based on these computational analyses, these modeling analyses, they think that terror birds use their head to basically batter their prey. They would go down and strike.

• 29:01Tristan Hughes?

  Repetitive.

• 29:02Speaker 05

  Repetively. Yeah, repetitively. I mean, not like a crazy axe murderer or something, just going, going nuts, but strategically. And they all, because they also had other weapons. They had really powerful legs, really thick legs, really big claws at the end of their feet. And it looks like those legs had a wide range of motion, uh, and they could be used to kick and they could be used to also pummel prey. So it seems like they might have, best we can tell from the fossils, used their feet to, to, you know, get a, get a little mammal or a big mammal or whatever into submission and then attack with the beak, pummel it.

• 29:39Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, yes, before we kind of go down the body, I mean, what prey should we be thinking of? So small and medium sized mammals, what types are we thinking of?

• 29:46Speaker 05

  Yeah, so South America, uh, during this time, when it was isolated as an island continent, it did not have all the same mammals as most of the rest of the world. A lot of the mammals there were marsupial mammals, like in Australia today, the ones that give birth to tiny little babies that they raise in pouches. So in Australia, that's kangaroos and wallabies and koalas. South America also still has a lot of marsupials and it seems like they got there before South America was an island and they just so happened to then have this opportunity to diversify when it became an island. There were some placental mammals. Those are the ones like us that can give live birth to well-developed young. There were a bunch of hoofed mammals in South America, but these were weird hoofed mammals.

• 30:31Speaker 05

  They were actually studied by Darwin. When Darwin sailed on the beagle, he went, uh, many times the beagle dropped anchor. He would go inland. He would of course, look at the plants and the animals and, and theorize about what they were doing, why there was such great diversity. But he would also try to find fossils and he would try to understand the history of these places. And so he went inland with some indigenous South Americans and they showed him these giant bones of mammals, mammals that seemed like a little bit like a horse, a little bit like an elephant, a little bit like a rodent, you know? They didn't really match any of the mammals in Europe or in North America. It turns out, we now know, because some DNA is preserved in some of the bones of those mammals in South America, they are weird horse and rhino relatives.

• 31:14Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  So they would have been like the biggest plant eaters at the time.

• 31:18Tristan Hughes?

  Ungulates.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  They were ungulates. Yep, they were ungulates and they were odd-toed ungulates, like a horse, rhinos and tapirs. They would have been probably some of the primary prey of the terror birds. And they ranged in size, basically the same way hoofed mammals do today, from little ones like, you know, little species of deer and sheep, all the way up to rhinos and cattle and so on. And then there would have been crocodiles there. There would have been some rodents and some monkeys, which are placental mammals like us, that actually rafted over from Africa. Their closest relatives are African.

• 31:52Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 31:52Speaker 05

  So they must have survived these one in a trillion seaward voyages after a storm or something, over the millions of years. So that's the world that terror birds lived in, this, this isolated island fortress of, of South America. They were the top predators. These strange hoofed mammals were the biggest plant eaters. There were also a lot of marsupial mammals and there were crocodiles and there were some weird rodents and monkeys that had come from Africa. This was that world, very different from anywhere else. That was the world that terror birds ruled.

• 32:25Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's keep going down the body. So we've mentioned. And the massive head and the incredibly powerful beak and attacking the prey. Um, but when you get images of terror birds, their neck is incredibly long, almost giraffe like. So what do we know about the neck?

• 32:41Speaker 05

  It's cool, isn't it? I mean, this is one of those, there's so many things when you look at a terror bird, when you look at the skeleton, that is just like, that's weird, that's wild, that's cool. And some of it are those extreme things like that big hooked beak, or like the really powerful feet, or the tiny little wings that didn't need wings to fly, but it kept them. Probably the same reason an ostrich keeps them today, to use for display, to attract mates and intimidate rivals, and maybe to help turn and break and slow down and, you know, when they're running. Those things are weird. Other things about terror birds, though, are actually quite normal for birds. It's just when you see them at giant size, they look strange. And the neck is one of those things. Birds have quite elongate, quite gracile, gracefully curved necks.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  And if you look at the skeleton of a pigeon or a chicken, you'd see the same thing. Uh, and that's actually something they inherited from their velociraptor type dinosaur ancestors. So that gracefully curved neck with the head at the end, you know, that's what allows birds to move their heads. You see birds moving their heads, bobbing their heads all the time. That's a normal bird thing. But when you look at a terror bird, it's so big, the neck looks so stretched. It kind of does look a little bit like a birdie version of a giraffe. And that adds, I think, to the charm, to the quirk of this animal.

• 33:57Tristan Hughes?

  Oh yeah, they must be incredibly muscly necks as well, you know, it's kind of all the movement. And, and then the body itself, as I said, small wings, completely covered in feathers. And I'm, I'm, I am picturing almost like an ostrich today, that kind of ovalish kind of body.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  I think it'd be, they would look quite similar to an ostrich. Uh, of course, the head would be much different. Ostriches have pretty small heads, terror birds would have these enormous heads. Terror birds probably had, all things considered, smaller wings, but it's hard to tell because we don't get the feathers really preserved as fossils very commonly. Terror birds would have had bigger, more muscular legs. Ostriches are super fast, they're the sprinters of not really the, only the bird world, really the animal world. I mean, these things are out in the savanna in Africa and they, I mean, they sprint like the fastest mammals sprint. So terror birds probably were pretty fast, not quite as fast as ostriches, probably because they were bulkier, but they had these more muscular legs and these big, powerful kickboxer feet,

• 34:57Speaker 05

  capped with these nasty gnarly claws, almost like the claws of like a velociraptor.

• 35:03Tristan Hughes?

  And do we know how they were able to walk and run with these massive claws?

• 35:07Speaker 05

  They would have held the claws off the ground, you know, like, like a velociraptor would. And, and, and we, there's even footprints of terror birds that show this as, as well. They kind of look in some ways like a velociraptor footprint, you know, you, you can tell the claws were held up so they wouldn't be damaged. So to me, that's incredible that these feet, I mean, they were like Swiss army knives. They could do so many things, they could run fast on these feet, then they could use their feet as murder weapons. And, and I mean, that's just, it's just wild to think about it. Some birds today use their feet to catch prey, some raptor birds, you know, birds of prey do it. But the terror birds probably really were like kickboxing with those feet and just jumping, leaping onto their prey, subduing it.

• 35:47Speaker 05

  And then if my friends, you know, the, the scientists that have done these biomechanical models, if they're correct, then once the prey was down, then the head perched on that powerful arched neck would have jabbed and jabbed and jabbed. But we think more like Muhammad Ali as a fighter, you know, just taking the opportunity, pulling back a little bit, you know.

• 36:10Tristan Hughes?

  Like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

• 36:12Speaker 05

  So float like a hummingbird, sting like a terror bird, I don't know. But, uh, but that's what, that's the idea they put forward, that it, that it would have been like a Muhammad Ali prizefighter. Not quite like a George Foreman or a Mike Tyson, that was much more like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, more selective, more selective.

• 36:31Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, I like you bringing it in with those sporting analogies.

• 36:34Speaker 05

  I wish I could say I came up with that analogy myself, but in the story of birds, I, I, I use that analogy. I credit Larry Whitmer, my, uh, my good friend, the paleontologist who came up with it.

• 36:43Tristan Hughes?

  I mean, but that's, that's, that's been a lovely description, actually, actually last thing, there's no tail or anything like that, no?

• 36:48Speaker 05

  No, so birds don't have tails. So the first birds did have tails, uh, the first birds in the fossil record was go back to about 150 million years old, back to the Jurassic period. They had feathers and wings, but they also had teeth, they had big claws on their hands and they had long tails. They really looked like little raptor dinosaurs, like a little velociraptor. Then over time, as birds became better flyers, their wings got bigger, their tails got shorter, just for aerodynamic reasons. And birds today have tail feathers, they have a big fan of feathers, but they don't have a long bony tail. They have this little stub, this little nubbin, it's called the piga style. You see it when you roast a chicken or back home when we roast Thanksgiving turkeys in, in America.

• 37:30Speaker 05

  It's this fatty little bulge at the end of the body, there's this little nubbin of bone inside. It's called the parson's nose in some old cookbooks. Cause it kind of looks like this twisted, you know, nose of like a, a parson in a medieval woodcutting. And it's really fatty, really glandular, it's not very good eating, but, but that's it, that's the remnant of the tail. So terror birds, because they were proper birds, because they evolved from birds that did fly, they had long lost their tails, so they didn't have a long tail, they couldn't use a long tail for balance, like say a velociraptor or a T-Rex could when they ran. So they must have balanced themselves in another way, and I don't really know how they did it. To me, that seems like a mystery.

• 38:10Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, brilliant description of terror birds and the classic image we have of them today. But as we're about to explore after this short break, um, there's much more to the story than just that, that initial design.

• 38:24Speaker 05

  There certainly is.

• 38:25Tristan Hughes?

  See you in a second.

• 38:30Speaker 01

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 39:14Tristan Hughes?

  Are you looking for the perfect podcasts to hunker down with during the longer, colder, darker nights?

• 39:21Speaker 06

  Well, look no further than the award-winning After Dark: Myths, Mistsdeeds and the Paranormal with me, Maddie Pelling.

• 39:27Tristan Hughes?

  And me, Anthony Delaney. We are historians and love all things gloomy and macabre.

• 39:33Speaker 06

  From Tudor executioners and ancient Egyptian death rituals to witch trials and folklore, feel transported back in time on After Dark, out every Monday and Thursday, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 39:44Tristan Hughes?

  And guess what? We're also now on YouTube, After Dark, a podcast from History Hit.

• 39:54Tristan Hughes?

  So Steve, that's the classic image we have of the terror bird, big, powerful, razor sharp claws, like, you know, really powerful beak as well for attacking.

• 40:06Tristan Hughes?

  But diversifying, this wasn't the only type of terror bird that thrived in South America for tens of millions of years.

• 40:13Speaker 05

  That's exactly right. And we should think of terror birds similar to maybe how we think of cats. You know, there's so many cats in the world today, and yes, they're all predators of some description, but they range from small little cats, you know, all the way up through lynxes and so on, all the way up to jaguars and cheetahs and tigers and lions. And so there would have been a similar diversity of terror birds in South America. The biggest ones were absolutely terrifying to the core. They were the top predators. They literally were filling those niches left behind by the big meat eating dinosaurs like T-Rex. But there were smaller terror birds as well that would have been predators,

• 40:54Speaker 05

  but they wouldn't have been pummeling these hoofed mammals and, and, and devouring these, uh, you know, interesting horse relatives and so on. They would have been going after smaller prey, maybe some of the small marsupials, maybe some of the small rodents, the, the, the smaller primates.

• 41:09Tristan Hughes?

  Do we know much at all? I remember asking you this about, um, T-Rex when we've done previous episodes, I always like asking it. But I appreciate it's more difficult from the surviving archaeology, paleontology. Do we know much about their young?

• 41:22Speaker 05

  I don't think we do. I don't, I honestly don't know. With, so with terror birds, you know, I had to learn a lot about them to write about them. I'm not a specialist on them in the sense that they're, I've never dug up terror bird fossils myself or studied them directly. I studied many other types of birds. I'd love to, this is now on my bucket list, to go to South America and work with some of my friends down there and find terror bird fossils. I'd just love to be able to find one of these skulls. I don't know if we have eggs. Maybe some eggs have been reported. There definitely are eggs that are fossilized for some of these other large birds, like the elephant birds and the demon ducks and so on. These demon ducks that I mentioned

• 42:02Speaker 05

  from Australia, these giant corpulent plant eating birds, their eggs are actually found in archaeological sites in Australia. Humans, the first humans to Australia were eating demon duck omelets for breakfast.

• 42:19Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 42:19Speaker 05

  Sadly, that's probably why the demon ducks went extinct. So we know the eggs of some of these large birds. Terror birds, I think, would have been pretty similar. We know, of course, a lot about how modern flightless birds raise their young, ostriches and cassowaries and emus and so on. They're very good parents. They differ in the details of how they do it. Some of them, the fathers raise, raise the eggs, raise the babies, which I love. As the father of a little six-year-old, you know, I just, I love the fact that I see some of these father birds with their kids. So we don't know, I think, for terror birds. I might be wrong. There might be something out there that somebody's discovered or something that somebody's found quite recently, but I think this is probably something that needs,

• 43:03Speaker 05

  needs to be discovered. We need to find terror bird eggs and terror bird nests and get a better idea of how they, they raise their young. And I'm sure the fossils are, are out there.

• 43:11Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, absolutely. And looking forward to seeing what comes out of the ground in the future. But come on, let's get to the end of the age of terror. So terror birds have been apex predators in South America, as an island, for tens of millions of years. But then, what happens?

• 43:28Speaker 05

  Something happened. Something big happened. And as, as is often the case in Earth history, you know, the Earth is four and a half billion years old, and the Earth is always changing. And sometimes it's an asteroid that arrives from the heavens. Sometimes it's big volcanoes or other changes that happen to the physical Earth. Sometimes the big changes are just the simple side effects of the continents of the Earth slowly moving, as they always do. You know, continents are moving. Now, the, the ground beneath our feet is moving about at the pace our fingernails go.

• 44:04Tristan Hughes?

  I feel it shaking.

• 44:04Speaker 05

  But I feel, yeah. But sometimes, yes, it does move more than others. And when there's a big earthquake, it might shift a lot more. But the Earth is always in motion. And South America became an island continent because it split away from the rest of those southern lands that were once part of Pangaea, the, the supercontinent. Then, South America would cease to become an island continent because of those same processes of plate tectonics, of continental drift, of the Earth moving around. What happened was about two and a half million years ago, give or take, South America and North America approached each other. And ever so slightly, fingers of land from both, but especially from the

• 44:47Speaker 05

  north, touched at what is the Isthmus of Panama. And that's where the Panama Canal is today, the easiest place to, you know, dig a canal between the Pacific and the Atlantic. If there was no Isthmus of Panama, you'd need no canal. That's a very recent geological phenomenon. Now, when that happened, probably for a few million years before, the land was close enough that some species could maybe move from north to south, just hopping across islands, maybe even swimming. There's some evidence that terror birds may have actually gotten to North America before the land actually touched.

• 45:21Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, okay.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  Not a long time before, but a little bit before. It all comes down to how accurately some of these bones and eggs, eggshells can be dated. Now that I say eggshells, I'm pretty sure there are terror bird eggshells from North America.

• 45:34Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 45:35Speaker 05

  I think, see, I'm, I'm thinking this through, the gears are turning in real time. But about two and a half million years ago, North and South America properly connected. And that meant there was now a land corridor. And that land corridor acted like a super highway. And there were animals that were streaming northwards from the south and animals streaming southwards from the north. This is when you get the ancestors of things like alpacas and llamas going down into South America. They've only been there for a little bit of time. They came from the north. There used to be camels in North America. That's what gave rise to these things. Jaguars and other big cats, bears, dogs, these kind of things that are now the top predators in South America, they came from the north. Meanwhile,

• 46:19Speaker 05

  there were things like some marsupials, possums, that came from the south up north. And now we have them at home. They're all over the Midwest where I'm from. There are things like some, some of the, the really interesting mammals, like armadillos. They're southern.

• 46:35Tristan Hughes?

  Really?

• 46:35Speaker 05

  They came north. That's why they're across.

• 46:37Tristan Hughes?

  The giant, and we get the giant.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  And there were even giant ones as well. You know, they went extinct during the Ice Age, or the end of the Ice Age, but there were armadillos the size of cars.

• 46:46Tristan Hughes?

  I love that.

• 46:46Speaker 05

  And they came from the south and moved north. So you had animals moving both ways. And that was just a huge disruption. It was just a time of migration, a time of dislocation. And when all was said and done, the terror birds just melted away. And it's not clear if they were outcompeted necessarily by jaguars or bears. They could have been on their way out otherwise. There, there was climate change happening, of course, as there often is, but there were some quite extreme climate changes around that time. That's when the Ice Ages proper were starting, so the Earth was getting much colder. And some of these terror birds reached North America as well, and they died out there too. So it, it really is a bit of a mystery as to exactly how they died. A lot of people will say it was

• 47:31Speaker 05

  because they were outcompeted by these, these cats and these bears and these dogs, these placental mammal carnivores is possible, but the story might be more complex. What we do know is that the very last terror birds did die. They disappeared from the fossil record, really just a few tens of thousands of years or so before the first humans got to South America. So we did not kill them. This one wasn't our fault. Other bird extinctions, elephant birds and Madagascar moas on New Zealand, dodos on Maldives.

• 48:02Tristan Hughes?

  Yep, yep.

• 48:03Speaker 05

  That's because of us, but this one wasn't. But we ever, ever so slightly missed that opportunity to meet a terror bird. Maybe a good thing.

• 48:13Tristan Hughes?

  But still, a great story to tell.

• 48:15Speaker 05

  It would have been incredible. Could you imagine if there was something in human legend, in the oral stories that passed down from somebody meeting a terror bird? I mean, we, we just missed that opportunity. You know, we just missed the opportunity for somebody to paint a terror bird on a cave wall. I mean, could you imagine?

• 48:33Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, dear. Ice Age would have a whole host of new characters. Yeah. And I always have that image of like, I mean, saber-toothed tigers meeting a terror bird.

• 48:42Speaker 05

  Yep. And they would have. Yep. They, they would have. There were saber-toothed tigers that lived in the north that came south when that interchange happened. So there would have been some overlap there. God knows if they came into a combat, I don't know. I don't know. That's for the movie makers.

• 48:58Tristan Hughes?

  Well, exactly. That's the, that's the image you sometimes get of the saber-toothed and the terror bird, don't you? Steve, this has been absolutely brilliant. A lovely introduction and explanation of the, the weird and wonderful world of terror birds, you know, and for how long they dominated South America from. They are just part of your brilliant new book, which is called?

• 49:20Speaker 05

  It's called The Story of Birds, and it is a pop science book. It's not an academic book. It's not a textbook. It is the story of what birds have done for the last 150 million years, how they evolved from dinosaurs, how some dinosaurs got feathers and wings and started to fly, how these feathery winged ones were the only ones to survive the asteroid, and then the amazing things they, they did afterwards, including things like terror birds, but also the evolution of cognition in crows and beautiful songs and many songbirds and the long migrations that birds have, all the amazing things birds do today. So it's similar to my previous books, Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs, The Rise and Reign of the Mammals. These are pop science books that try to tell these grand stories about evolution.

• 50:01Tristan Hughes?

  And of course, for our next episode, penguins.

• 50:04Speaker 05

  Yes, penguins. Maybe even more terrifying than terror birds. I'm just leaving that hanging. You wouldn't think so, but stay tuned.

• 50:13Tristan Hughes?

  Stay tuned indeed for that. Right. Yes, we'll see you in a bit. Steve, this has been absolutely brilliant.

• 50:20Speaker 05

  Always a pleasure.

• 50:21Tristan Hughes?

  Thank you. Thanks so much for joining us on The Ancients today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you are loving The Ancients, then why not become a History Hit subscriber? As a subscriber, you will have access to hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week, plus early access and ad-free podcasts. You can sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 51:34Speaker 03

  I'm Connor Tomlinson from Love on the Spectrum. History is my thing, and I've been waiting my whole life for a show like this one.

• 51:41Speaker 04

  And I'm Carter Roy, and this is What the Fact. Three facts a week, each with the whole story behind it. The history class you actually wished you had in school. New episodes every Wednesday. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What the Fact Pod.