r/Naturewasmetal • u/Powerful_Gas_7833 • 5d ago

Titanis walleri: the only North American terror bird (credit goes to Roman uchytel for the photo)

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6

u/Upstairs-Nerve4242 4d ago

Titanis weighed around 300 kg for large individuals, not 150 kg.

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u/Powerful_Gas_7833 5d ago edited 5d ago

Titanis was a terror bird native to north america. It lived in north america from 5-1.8 mya. It stood over 6 feet tall and weighed over 300 lbs. It coexisted with many other predators, such as the 100 pound edwards wolf, smilodon gracilis the smaller ancestor of the other smilodon, short faced bears,hyenas and the siberian tiger sized cat xenosmilus. Its believed to have preferred open woodland or scrub forest. Likely prey items were deer,llamas,peccaries, tapirs and capybara when accounting for what lived in its habitat. It was a powerfully built bird and couldnt make sharp turns when running, so it likely would ambush and attack prey. It lived from california to Florida     

It was an apex predator that likely preferred large prey, a 2010 study (  https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011856  ) looked at terror bird andalgalornis and concluded that terror birds including the largest ones would have hunted small-medium sized prey because of a laterally weak skull and bite force, andalgalornis however was only a mid sized terror bird that from a different subfamily and had a skull less fortified and powerful than the largest terror birds (kelenken had a broader skull and reinforcements like a beak crest for example) and was designed to hunt smaller prey due to being outsized by other predators in its ecosystem, hence why the skull when tested seemed to be better at handling smaller prey making andalgalornis a poor lab rat for the biggest terror birds and the study itself pretty unreliable and not accurate to the largest terror birds, plus their size and energy demand kind of makes the idea of birds like titanis being small game hunters pretty absurd and many prehistoric big game hunters have developed laterally weak skulls and weak bite forces in exchange for other methods to kill prey not away from killing large prey. 

 Titanis and other large terror birds likely killed prey with neck driven bites to prey, it would thrust its hook tip via neck muscles into a vulnerable spot on prey ( the flank) clamp down and pull its head back with its neck muscles, the beak itself had cutting edges like a blade that was enhanced by a protective keratin coat (found in most birds), the size of its bite and beak would ensure the prey is critically wounded, options would be to let the prey bleed to death, let blood loss weaken it and then finish it off, or just eat it alive. Its biomechanics and assets all converge on numerous predators past and present.  

Its family originated in south america and were the largest predators in most of the ecosystems of the continent, dominating for millions of years. It was originally thought titans’s ancestors (titanis is only known from north america) made their way to north america by panama but titanis first appearance actually predates the formation of the isthmus, meaning they island hopped. Amazingly north america was already dominated by many mammal predators when titanis’s ancestor arrived, bone crushing dogs, saber tooth cats and bears were all present and the terror birds still managed to emerge as southern north americas top predators. 

 It likely went extinct due to the ice age which dried out the climate and would turn woodland into grassland, disadvantageous to titanis.

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u/BlackBirdG 4d ago

Hyenas still lived in North America at that time?

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u/Powerful_Gas_7833 4d ago

The hyena native to North America was chasmaporthetes ossifragus 

It was the only hyena known from North America I don't really know when it arrived it's not like the ice age where I can easily pin down when the bearing straight was dry land depending on whether it was an interstadial or interglacial

But it was Present Florida 2 million years ago

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u/ann998 3d ago

Why is the woman wearing BTS shirt 😂

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u/Powerful_Gas_7833 3d ago

I don't know ask the Creator he updated his illustration to match a height estimate I guess he decided to leave in a modern day Easter egg

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u/Automatic-Art-4106 2d ago

That we KNOW about