Diatryma

Generally, when we think about birds, we think about small birds such as sparrows and songbirds. We might possibly think about our modern birds of prey, such as hawks, eagles and owls, or maybe even large flightless birds such as ostriches and emus. We probably do not think about some of the giant birds that first appeared during the early part of the Cenozoic Era (65 million years ago to the present), such as Diatryma.

Diatryma gigantea was a large, flightless bird that lived in North America and western Europe during the Paleocene Epoch (65 to 55 million years ago) and Eocene Epoch (55 to 36 million years ago), when Laurasia was separating into the modern continents. Diatryma was named in 1874 by paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Gastornis is another genus of extinct birds; found in France, it may either be a close relative of Diatryma, or may be the same animal, but its fossils are too rare to determine which.

Diatryma belongs to the Order Gruiformes, a group of birds that appeared in the Late Cretaceous Period (140 to 65 million years ago). The Gruiformes quickly began to diversify, and they ranged from small, strong flyers to giant, flightless birds. Most of the modern Gruiformes are aquatic birds such as cranes, rails, moorhens and coots, but the order also includes ground-living species such as the bustards and trumpeters.

Diatryma was a large, seven-foot-(2.1 meters)-tall, heavily built bird with very small wings and an unkeeled sternum; it was incapable of flight. It had powerful legs with strong, clawed feet and was probably a strong runner, although there is some debate as to how fast it could run. Despite the large size of the Diatrymas, they exhibit the hollow bones and extensive air-sac system seen in flying birds, making them light and presumably very fast runners. They could have leapt at their prey, using their short wings and stumpy tails for balance, and using their powerful talons to tear at their prey, the same way that Deinonychus and Velociraptor did, before delivering a bone-crushing bite to the back of the neck.

Diatryma's most notable feature was its large, parrot-like beak. Some paleontologists believe that this large, sharp beak indicate that Diatryma was the dominant predator of the northern continents during its time, just as the Phorusrhacids were in South America during the Oligocene Epoch (36 to 22.5 million years ago) and Miocene Epoch (22.5 to 5 million years ago). The dinosaurs had all become extinct during the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction Event, and mammals were still relatively small.

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