“Bony-toothed jaws are rare in the vertebrate record,” senior museum scientist Pat Holroyd says. In 2003, however, the more than 10,000 fossils of the Riverside collection were transferred to the University of California Museum of Paleontology at the Berkeley campus, the bird bones among them. The jaw and foot bone were just two of a huge collection kept at the University of California Riverside.

Those bones then made a long journey to California, but their story was only just starting. By comparing a pair of polar fossils to the remains of related birds, paleontologists have been able to identify the early history of enormous fliers that were some of the first birds capable of soaring across seas.ĭuring the 1980s, University of California Berkeley paleontologist Peter Kloess says, scientists searching for Antarctic fossils found some delicate bird bones-a jaw and part of a foot from an ancient bird-on Seymour Island. The new study documenting the birds, published today in Scientific Reports, is the result of a fossil detective story spanning from Antarctica to California. And now paleontologists have uncovered in that group what may be the largest known flying birds ever, with wingspans of roughly 20 feet. Set that strange creature about 50 million years in the past and you’ve got the image of a pelagornithid, a group of ancient avians that included some of the largest flying birds of all time. Imagine an albatross with a hacksaw for a mouth.

Longest wingspan