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

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the Oligocene, after the tectonic creation of Drake’s Passage (which separates South America from Antarctica), the climate cooled significantly due to the advent of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current, which brought cold Antarctic water to the surface. In fact, generally speaking, this era (the Cenozoic) could be characterised as a period of long-term cooling. Source: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/vol292/issue5517/images/large/se1619374001.jpeg So, all in all, it was a time of many changes in the history of life on the planet, and a time when for quite a while the dominant predators were reptilian (large lizards and terrestrial crocodiles), and avian (large birds, some of which were flightless). By the way, though we, mammals call this the age of mammals, in reality it ought to be called the age of birds, because avian forms outnumbered the mammalian ones two to one at least. Snakes also enjoyed a period of massive speciation during this era, partly because
their chief prey, the rodents, also diversified greatly during this time. Another significant evolutionary feature during this time was the co-evolution of flowering plants and insects, which continued to develop the evolutionary co-dependence they had pioneered earlier, and which I wrote about in a previous post. Anyway, getting back to the main subject for this post, as far as the birds went, there was a gigantic eagle, Haast’s eagle, which evolved in New Zealand, and which hunted moas, which were enormous flightless birds. There is even some folkloric and not well substantiated evidence that these eagles attacked and ate humans, as the Maori have stories of a bird, called the pouakai bird, or the hokioi, which descended from the sky to kill and eat people. Some people have speculated that this eagle was also the inspiration for the roc bird in the story of Sindbad the sailor (which features in the 1001 nights, as recounted by Shahrazad / Scheherazade), but the connection seems to me tenuous at best – though Marco Polo does talk of a rukh bird, and it is possible that Chinese seafarers could have picked stories of this New Zealand bird up from the various Malayo-Polynesian sailors who were around in the South- East Asian ports frequented by the Chinese at the time. For my money, the roc of Sindbad is more probably inspired by the Malagasy Crowned Eagle of Madagascar, which almost certainly fed on the enormous elephant birds (see below) and on the vaguely human-like lemurs, and with which Arab and Persian sailors might have had contact. Haast’s eagle (and possibly the Malagasy Crowned Eagle) were the only eagles ever to be the top predator in their respective ecosystems. Source: http://tyrannosaurusversusspermwhale.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/giant_haasts_eagle_atta cking_new_zealand_moa.jpg
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Cenozoic birds and reptiles The Cenozoic (also Cainozoic or ...

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