Cenozoic birds and reptiles The Cenozoic (also Cainozoic or ...

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aepyornis The elephant bird of Madagascar, which
stood over 3 metres tall (so a 2 metre human standing next to this bird would just come up to
the base of its neck), displayed together with its egg, which had a circumference of just over
a metre! This animal was one of the many species to have gone extinct as a result of contact
with humans. Whatever the opposite of the Midas touch is (the Sadim touch?), we certainly
seem to have it as far as biodiversity and ecology are concerned.
As I mentioned earlier, during much of the time that terror birds walked the Earth,
South America was an island continent, and its unique cargo of species evolved in isolation
from the rest of the world. Then, three million years ago, the two American continents were
connected. This allowed North American predators, such as jaguars and sabre-toothed cats, to
invade South America, where they outcompeted the remaining terror-bird species, driving
them to extinction.
Relatively little is known about the life-styles of the terror birds. Since there are no
large, flightless carnivorous birds alive today, scientists cannot observe and extrapolate from
them, and must instead turn to observations of the smaller flightless carnivorous birds, like the
secretary bird of Africa, and the seriema of S. America to garner clues as to how the large
birds might have behaved. One big problem with this approach is that neither the secretary
bird, nor the seriema is the top predator in its ecosystem, but the terror birds probably were, so
behavioural extrapolations are likely to be tenuous. In addition, few complete terror-bird
fossils have been unearthed, thus complicating matters even further.
Researchers still do not know if terror birds hunted in groups – as velociraptors
(bipedal dinosaurs who share a similar body shape) are thought to have – or alone, as jaguars
or tigers do today. That they were meat-eaters is fairly certain, based on the form and
structure of their beaks, which resemble those of predatory eagles and scavenging vultures.