The Guardian has a post about large flightless bird that might have roamed Europe at the same time. Researchers discovered the fossilized thigh bone of a giant bird in a cave on the Crimean peninsula. It belonged to an animal called Pachystruthio dmanisensis, which lived between 1.5 and 1.6 million years ago. This bone and others were described in a paper in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Analysis of the 40cm-long bone and others found with it date the remains to between 1.5m and 1.8m years old, suggesting the birds may have been part of the local wildlife when Homo erectus, an ancient ancestor of modern humans, reached Europe 1.2m years ago.
The enormous birds may well have been a valuable source of meat, bones, feathers and eggshells for the early human settlers, the scientists say.
Nikita Zelenkov, a palaeontologist at the Russian Academy of Sciences, said that when he first received the thigh bone for study he thought it must be from a long-extinct elephant bird from Madagascar. “No birds of this size have ever been reported from Europe,” he said.
