Argentavis Magnifices

This website like is like being in a nightclub in Wigan, because we go from one big bird to another. The Argentavis Magnifices holds the honour of being the largest flying bird ever recorded (well, until we get some clearer facts about new kid on the block, Pelagornis sandersi) and lived during the relatively recent Miocene epoch 23 - 6 million years ago. These birds had wingspans of 23 feet and were master gliders through the air, but because of their size had difficulty in taking off to fly, and so much like a human hang glider would have to take off today, they ran downhill into wind blowing directly in front.

Argentavis lived in Argentina and probably enjoyed long lifespans of up to 100 years with no predators, most likely going extinct because of a changing, cooler climate at the end of the Miocene epoch.

The Argentavis is a member of an extinct group of massive birds of prey called Teratorns that lived between the Miocene and Pleistocene epochs. And whilst modern humans would never have had to have deal with a beast like Argentavis swooping around them and picking them up for dinner, they certainly would have had to have contended with another member of the Teratorn group, Aiolornis incredibilis, which had wingspans of 16 feet - smaller than Argentavis, but still huge. The closest animal we have to these today in terms of behaviour is the Californian Condor, which is the largest bird in North America, but has sadly been on an evolutionary life support machine since the 1980s.

  The Pleistocene epoch in which the Aiolornis incredibilis lived, is such an incredibly interesting period of time, because you get modern humans interacting and causing the extinction of certain megafauna - huge land mammals like the mammoth, giant ground sloths, saber-toothed cat and our friends in the Teratorn group. In fact, the cast list of the extinct megafauna of North and South America is so mind-blowing that I could spend the entire lifespan of this blog covering just that era, but for now I think the giant ground sloths need to be the next to have their moment in the sun purely because they were, quite frankly, ridiculous:

I mean, WHAT!

Gigantopithecus

 Setting the dial on our geological time travelling machine to a relatively recent period now, as we head back only 150,000 years ago to the Pleistocene epoch. In the dwindling bamboo forests of South Asia we might find our extinct homo-genus cousins, Homo Erectus (the oldest living of the homo- species) treading very carefully. That's because Homo Erectus had to share these forests with Giganthopithecus Blacki, the largest ape ever known. At nearly 10 feet tall, these bamboo-eating apes were King Kong before King Kong was even a thing.

My interest in Giganthopithecus was fuelled when I saw an artistic interpretation of what one of these apes might have looked like, and I was struck by the immediate resemblance to my ex-partner. Regardless, much of what we know about this 540 kg 'bigfoot' comes from teeth and jaws found in Vietnam, and the dental studies show that they lived on a diet of seeds, fruit and bamboo. What led to their extinction is likely to be a combination of climate change and a low reproductive rate, although there is also a strong possibility that Homo Erectus aggravated their demise, as shown in this aforementioned illustration: