#garganornis

[chaobunnyarts]

May sticker club theme reveals: Satanic Leaf-Tailed Gecko & Australian Green Tree Frog, and Pansy Titanis & Garganornis (we're going prehistoric birds this month!)

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[veloci-raptor]

Fossil Novembirb: Day 22

Garganornis with Hoplitomeryx for scale

[alphynix]

Island Weirdness #16 -- Garganornis ballmanni

While some of the main big herbivores on the Late Miocene Gargano-Scontrone island(s) were the larger species of Hoplitomeryx, they weren’t the only animals filling that ecological niche.

Garganornis was an enormous anatid bird, closely related to modern ducks, geese, and swans. Although only known from fragments of its skeleton it’s estimated to have stood up to 1.5m tall (4′11″), making it the largest known waterfowl to have ever lived.

It probably reached such a size thanks to the lack of large terrestrial predators, and possibly also as protection against the island eagles and owls -- literally growing too big for them to be able to eat.

It was flightless, with small wings, and had reduced webbing between its toes, suggesting it spent most of its time walking around on land. It also had bony knobs on its wrists that would have been used to give some extra force to wing-slaps when fighting with each other over territory or mates.

[typhlonectes]

Extinct giant goose used its wings to fight rather than fly

Extinct giant goose used its wings to fight rather than fly

A giant goose that lived on a Mediterranean island between six and nine million years ago had wings tailored for combat.

Weighing 22 kilograms and standing perhaps 1.5 metres tall, Garganornis ballmanni might be the biggest member of the duck, goose and swan family ever to have lived. Its fossilised bones have been found at Gargano and Scontrone in central Italy – a region that, during the Miocene, consisted of islands populated by unique species.

Its wing bones are short for its size, suggesting it couldn’t fly. Now an analysis led by Marco Pavia at the University of Turin, Italy, shows that the carpometacarpus bone – equivalent to the hand bones in humans – had a rounded lump called the carpal knob, a feature present in modern birds that fight each other over territory. These include some ducks, geese and the extinct Rodrigues solitaire, the closest relative of the dodo...

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Garganornis ballmanni

By Scott Reid on @drawingwithdinosaurs

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Name: Garganornis ballmanni

Status: Extinct

First Described: 2014

Described By: Meijer

Classification: Dinosauria, Saurischia, Eusaurischia, Theropoda, Neotheropoda, Averostra, Tetanurae, Orionides, Avetheropoda, Coelurosauria, Tyrannoraptora, Maniraptoriformes, Maniraptora, Pennaraptora, Paraves, Eumaniraptora, Averaptora, Avialae, Euavialae, Avebrevicauda, Pygostylia, Ornithothoraces, Euornithes, Ornithuromorpha, Ornithurae, Neornithes, Neognathae, Galloanserae, Anseriformes, Anseres, Anatoidea, Anatidae? 

Garganornis is an extraordinarily enormous extinct species of waterfowl from Fissure Fillings in Gargano and Scontrone of Italy, living about 9 to 5.3 million years ago, from the Tortonian to the Messinian ages of the Miocene of the Neogene. It was approximately 30% larger than the modern mute swan and, as such, it would have weighed somewhere between 15 and 22 kilograms - and, for comparison here, mallards weigh between 0.72 and 1.58 kilograms. Garganornis lived in what were probably very isolated and open habitats in Italy, potentially with few or even no predators. This is thought to have been the major contributor to its large size. In fact, it has a lot of convergent traits with Gastornis and Dromornithids, possibly indicating that both groups evolved similarly in order to achieve large size. 

By Jack Wood on @thewoodparable 

Garganornis lived alongside many other animals including other dinosaurs such as the duck Anas, the eagle Garganoaetus, the pheasant Palaeortyx, the owl Tyto, the pigeon Columba, the swift Apus, the sandpiper Calidris, and some other unnamed variety of birds. However, all of these birds were primarily from Gargano - Garganornis is the only bird found both in Gargano and Scontrone. Lots of giant mammals are known from the area as well, such as giant rodents, hedgehogs, and deers with large spiky horns. Their open habitats were probably islands at the time of the Miocene, which contributed to their island gigantism and aided in these animals becoming so large, in addition to the absence of many predators. In addition, Garganornis probably wasn’t able to fly due to its heavy weight, and in fact, its wrist bones had little outgrowth that would have allowed wing slaps to be extremely powerful - giving Garganornis essentially club-wings that it would have used to fight with other birds in its habitat, to fight for mates or over territory. 

Sources: 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garganornis 

http://blogs.plos.org/paleocomm/2017/01/23/meet-garganornis-the-giant-flightless-weapon-winged-goose-from-ancient-italy/ 

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-fossils-ancient-extinct-giant-flightless.html 

[albertonykus]

Selection of new dinosaurs announced in 2013.