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SUBSCRIBE:<\/strong> Apple<\/a> | Spotify<\/a><\/p>\n Jeff DelViscio:<\/strong> Hi, Science, Quickly listeners. This is Jeff DelViscio, executive producer of the show.<\/p>\n Well, it\u2019s the end of the year, and the whole team is taking a moment to look back at some of our favorite shows from 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n My pick has all the elements of perfect podcast\u2013it\u2019s got monsters the size of small airplanes, a discovery hiding (for three decades) in plain site, and the words: \u201cpasserine peep show.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n It comes from host Flora Lichtman and it\u2019s also the start of an epic 4-part mini-series filled with creatures built like tanks and axe murderers.\u00a0<\/p>\n Basically a little thrill to add to your holiday chill.\u00a0<\/p>\n Enjoy, and see you next year! And happy holidays everybody.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u2014<\/p>\n This Episode originally aired<\/a> on May 31, 2023. You can listen to the entire 4-part series on \u201cmonster birds\u201d here<\/a>.<\/p>\n Flora Lichtman:<\/strong> You are listening to Scientific American<\/em>\u2019s Science, Quickly,<\/em> and I\u2019m Flora Lichtman.<\/p>\n This week I want to take you bird-watching. But I\u2019m not talking about an ordinary passerine peep show. We\u2019re skipping the songbirds.<\/p>\n [CLIP: North American Cardinal sound]<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>It\u2019s a no fly zone for hawks and raptors.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Red-shouldered Hawk sound]<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Waterfowl? Throw in the towel.\u00a0<\/p>\n [CLIP: Duck sound]<\/p>\n [Music]<\/p>\n The birds we\u2019re gonna meet, they\u2019re not like anything you\u2019ve ever peeped.<\/p>\n Federico Degrange:<\/strong> They used the beak as an axe to kill prey.<\/p>\n Lichtman (tape):<\/strong> Oh, my God.\u00a0<\/p>\n Daniel Ksepka:<\/strong> So just imagine the largest thing you’ve ever seen alive flying.<\/p>\n James Hansford: <\/strong>They are colossal. Around 1,900 pounds.\u00a0<\/p>\n Alicia Grealy:<\/strong> The eggs would have been about 150 times the size of chicken egg.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> So we\u2019re maybe talking like almost two feet for feathers, which is\u2014that\u2019s a big feather.<\/p>\n Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan:<\/strong> Most people, you know, think ostrich\u2014 and they think that\u2019s big. But actually they were real giants around at one time.<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>We are talking about birds that weighed as much as a sports car, birds who were the top predators of their day\u2014prowling the jungle and devouring animals the size of small horses\u2014birds so gargantuan that you could mistake them for an airplane.\u00a0<\/p>\n And yet these birds have kinda flown under the radar of paleontology\u2014at least compared with many dinosaurs. These winged whoppers are mysterious, and scientists are learning more about them every day.<\/p>\n For the next four episodes of Science, Quickly,<\/em> I\u2019m going to introduce you to them. We\u2019re hunting for the most extreme birds to ever live. Welcome to part one of a four-part Fascination on the real big birds.<\/p>\n I want you to meet one of our guides.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> My name is Daniel Ksepka.<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Dan is an avian paleontologist.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> And I am the curator of science at the Bruce Museum.<\/p>\n Lichtman (tape):<\/strong> What\u2019s your relationship to big extinct birds?<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> I love them, and they love me.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Ocean shore sounds]\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>Okay, I want you to just close your eyes. Dan is going to set the scene for the first monster we\u2019re going to meet.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> Imagine you\u2019re standing in South Carolina 27 million years ago. You\u2019re looking out over the\u2014over the sea.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Wind sound]<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> It\u2019s rough waves.<\/p>\n [CLIP: Wave sound]<\/p>\n Ksepka: <\/strong>And then, just hanging in the air, you know, blocking out the sun…, the largest thing you\u2019ve ever seen alive flying, like a double albatross\u2014like this wingspan of 20 feet. So that is pretty magnificent. It flies over you. It\u2019s probably like the moment of your whole lifetime, you know\u2014the wonder of seeing that.<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>This bird is called Pelagornis sandersi<\/em><\/a>. It doesn\u2019t have a common name.<\/p>\n Ksepka<\/strong>: Oh, I just call it Pelagornis<\/em>. I don\u2019t call it, like, Bobby or anything.<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>Dan was the first to scientifically describe the fossil. And we\u2019ll get to why he named it P. sandersi<\/em> in a minute. That story starts when this fossil flew into his life, out of the blue.<\/p>\n Ksepka: <\/strong>Pelagornis<\/em> was totally an accident of, like, luck and fortune.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>Dan didn\u2019t find the fossil. It had been excavated in South Carolina back in the 1980s\u2014long before Dan ever laid eyes on it.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> They were doing excavations at, like, Charleston Airport, and someone hit some bones with, you know, some kind of digging equipment. And they stopped the work.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>And called in some backup: the late Al Sanders, a paleontologist at the local Charleston Museum.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> And he came down there with a team, and they collected it. And then, you know, I would have thought that anyone who found this would stop dead in their tracks and make it their priority because it was, like, you know, the largest flying bird ever.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> At least that\u2019s what an avian<\/em> paleontologist would have done. But Al Sanders was more of a whale fossil guy. So he brought the fossil back to the museum and tucked it away.<\/p>\n Ksepka: <\/strong>And Al just had it in a drawer in the bottom of this, like, cabinet in the museum.<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> And it sat there for about 30 years. Then one day Al told Dan about the bones. And Dan wasn\u2019t expecting much.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> And, yeah, I wasn\u2019t expecting to see, like, the largest bird ever in a drawer when I went down there. I would have been happy with, like, a duck or something.\u00a0<\/p>\n [Music]<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Sitting in that drawer collecting dust was a roughly 27-million-year-old fossil that didn\u2019t look like anything Dan had ever seen before.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> I just took the wing bone out and put it on the floor and laid down next to it and took a picture with my cell phone because it was longer than my whole arm\u2014one of the three bones.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Dan named it Pelagornis sandersi<\/em> in honor of Al Sanders, the unknowing keeper of this truly massive discovery. Dan set out to understand all he could about this bird. And he found the bird\u2019s 20-foot wingspan wasn\u2019t the only astonishing thing about it. The bird wasn\u2019t just big. It was bizarre.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> I couldn\u2019t believe the skull. It doesn\u2019t look anything like a bird. It just almost looks like a small alligator.<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Its foot-and-a-half-long beak was packed with chompers.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> They have these, these false teeth.<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Not dentures. They\u2019re false in that they\u2019re not made of what our teeth are made of: dentin and enamel. But they still have bite.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> They\u2019re actually projections of bone. So they\u2019re little spikes of bone, and they alternate in size. So there\u2019s, like, a small and a medium and a large in sequence, and they undulate in that pattern.<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> And they were probably great for piercing and holding slippery stuff …<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> So, like, something like a fish or a squid that would be very good to grasp onto.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Beside the fishy fake teeth, the bird\u2019s shoulder bones were also strange. The bird\u2019s shoulder blades were teeny tiny. And the shoulder joint and the bone that attaches to it had an unusual shape.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> It just doesn\u2019t look like it could really rotate in the same way a normal bird can.\u00a0<\/p>\n And so this bird may not have really been able to lift its wing, like, above, you know, the level of its back. And so it\u2019s not flapping like a gull. It\u2019s not flapping like a songbird.<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Picture a cardinal getting off the ground, pushing its wings up and down, fast and hard. This behemoth likely just spread its 20-foot wings and let the wind do the work.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> It\u2019s like a giant kite. And so it probably got into the air, either from facing into the wind, maybe giving a little awkward running start, maybe using elevation to its advantage …<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> And once this bird was aloft, Dan said it could probably soar for great distances.<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> I wouldn\u2019t be surprised if, you know, Pelagornis<\/em> could just cross the Atlantic and, you know, stop over in Africa or Europe and then come back as part of its seasonal migration.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> This species, Pelagornis sandersi,<\/em> has only been found in Charleston, but its relatives\u2014others birds in this fake tooth flock\u2014show up all over.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ksepka:<\/strong> They are everywhere throughout the world. We found fossils in Antarctica, New Zealand and Washington and Oregon, in Europe, in Africa, in South America. They\u2019re literally known from every continent.<\/p>\n [Music]<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>Between the huge size and the take teeth, Pelagornis<\/em> might be one of the weirdest birds in Earth\u2019s history. And the thought that flies into my head is: How did this bird come to be? Dan thinks the appearance of this group – the pelagornithids – may have to do with the disappearance of other strange, giant flying creatures.\u00a0<\/p>\n Ksepka: <\/strong>So in the case of pelagornithids, this particular role would be filled by flying reptiles in the Cretaceous period. Some of those species would be far larger even than Pelagornis,<\/em> and they die out in the same extinction event that kills off the nonavian dinosaurs, and that allows a new group to maybe explore the very large flying animal role. And pelagornithids are the first group that seizes that.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>They swooped into an open niche. And I heard the same thing from many of the big bird researchers I talked to for this series\u2014that these giant birds trundled onto the scene in part because the mass extinction cleared the competition. And that didn\u2019t just mean dinosaurs; other reptiles and early birds went extinct, too. So the survivors had access to resources and ecosystems that weren\u2019t available before.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve heard a lot about the mammalian radiation over the years\u2014that mammals had their heyday when dinos disappeared. But in a post-dinosaur world, birds also spread their wings and speciated.<\/p>\n Ksepka: <\/strong>There is a spectacular radiation of birds happening in the first few million years after that mass extinction. So the modern birds\u2019 ancestors have the chance to explore arboreal habitats or predatory habitats or aquatic habitats kind of for the first time. And they really\u2014they go a little bit wild.\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman:<\/strong> Pelagornis<\/em> is just the beginning. We\u2019ve got more wild birds to meet in the next few episodes: birds that rose like a phoenix after the dinosaurs went extinct and became unlike any birds still alive today.<\/p>\n Ksepka: <\/strong>So, like, elephant birds, may have been the largest bird that ever lived.<\/p>\n Alicia Grealy: <\/strong>Yeah, so some could have been up to 1,000 kilos, which is a ton. I mean that\u2019s why they\u2019re called elephant birds, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n Lichtman: <\/strong>That\u2019s on the next episode of this four-part Science, Quickly<\/em> Fascination on really big birds.<\/p>\n Our show is produced by Jeff DelViscio, Tulika Bose and Kelso Harper. The theme music was composed by Dominic Smith.\u00a0<\/p>\n Don\u2019t forget to subscribe to Science, Quickly<\/em> wherever you get your podcasts. Head over to ScientificAmerican.com<\/a> for in-depth science news.<\/p>\n For Science, Quickly<\/em>\u2014I\u2019m Flora Lichtman.<\/p>\n SUBSCRIBE:<\/strong> Apple<\/a> | Spotify<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n