Scientific American:

Scientists reveal the face of Australia’s massive, extinct “giga-goose”

BY KATE EVANS

Just 50,000 years ago giants roamed the Australian continent—including a wombat relative the size of a rhinoceros, a monitor lizard as long as a crocodile, a heavy-set kangaroo and a “marsupial lion.” And now researchers have uncovered and reconstructed the skull of a 6.5-foot-tall, 500-pound flightless bird that they’ve nicknamed the “giga-goose,” resolving more than a century of speculation about this species’ ancestry.

In 1893 camel-riding palaeontologists dug up a nearly complete skeleton of a massive bird that, tens of thousands of years prior, had gotten itself mired in the mud of Lake Callabonna in South Australia. While its body was remarkably preserved, its fossil skull was “very dodgy”—crumbly, crushed and distorted—says Phoebe McInerney, an evolutionary biologist who recently received a Ph.D. from Flinders University in Australia.

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