25 million-year-old eagle fossil discovered in Australia
A recently discovered 25 million-year-old eagle fossil found in South Australia appears to be unique to the continent and adds raptors’ long evolutionary history in Australia. Paleontologists from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, have unearthed Australia’s oldest eagle fossils from a remote outback cattle station and in it have found a new fossil species from the late Oligocene era, which ended 23 million years ago.
Named Archaehierax sylvestris, this species of raptor is among the oldest known eagles in the world. “Our new Archaehierax (pron. ah-kay-hi-rax) does not group with other eagles in the family tree of eagles and hawks — it has primitive characteristics that set it apart and as one of the first branches on the family tree. This is not unexpected given its age. It however is clearly quite different to all the eagles etc. from the Northern Hemisphere, suggesting it was part of a group evolving along its separate line in Australia. Not unexpected given Australia is nearly the same size as the USA,” Worthy continued.
“This species was slightly smaller and leaner than the wedge-tailed eagle, but it’s the largest eagle known from this time period in Australia,” Mather said in a press release. “The foot span was nearly 15 cm long, which would have allowed it to grasp large prey. The largest marsupial predators at the time were about the size of a small dog or large cat, so Archaehierax was certainly ruling the roost.”
The remains of Archaehierax were discovered during university researchers’ ongoing investigation into a lost ecosystem along the barren shore of a dry lake known as Lake Pinpa in what is today a desolate and sandy desert habitat. Australia’s interior was, then, a rainforest with extensive tree coverage and lush forests. “Now a very dry desert, it was once rainforest. This fossil site gives us one of the best windows into that lost world. Predators are always very rare so to find much of a skeleton was really most unexpected. As it turns out, it is very significant and reveals that Australia had its own Accipitridae, or eagles and hawks etc., 25 million years ago,” Worthy said.
A lot more at:
https://www.courthousenews.com/25-million-year-old-eagle-fossil-discovered-in-australia/
