Terror chicken could have been killed by even greater creature 13 million years in the past, chunk marks counsel

Standing round 10 toes tall, weighing round 220 kilos and with an axe-like beak able to delivering devastating strikes, the phobia chicken would have proved a formidable foe for many creatures.

But round 13 million years in the past, one in every of them could have fallen prey to a fair bigger creature, a workforce of paleontologists in Colombia have found after inspecting chunk marks in a fossilized bone of one of many fearsome birds.

Publishing their findings within the peer-reviewed scientific journal “Biology Letters,” the workforce hypothesized that it was killed and eaten or consumed by way of scavenging by a medium sized caiman, a crocodile-like reptile.

“This is a fascinating story of the interaction of two very iconic animals in the past,” Andrés Link, the research’s lead writer, informed NBC News in an electronic mail Wednesday. “We actually found not only the first record of a terror bird in northern south America, but the tooth marks of a large caiman that has probably fed on it,” he added.

Terror chicken fossils, that are uncommon, have principally been recognized in the southern part of the continent.

While tooth marks are “not uncommon” within the fossil report, it’s “exciting” to search out proof that signifies an apex predator being hunted or scavenged by one other, mentioned Link, an affiliate professor of organic sciences on the Los Andes University in Colombia.

Writing in “Biology Letters,” the workforce mentioned the enamel marks confirmed no indicators of therapeutic, suggesting that the assault was deadly.

Based on the discovering, they added that terror birds might need confronted larger threat of being killed and eaten than beforehand anticipated.

To determine the attacker, Link and his workforce scanned the fossil and analyzed the scale, form and spacing of the tooth marks. After evaluating these marks with enamel of crocodyliforms from the area, they concluded that the hint maker was probably a juvenile caiman about 15 toes lengthy.

It stays “very difficult” to know if the caiman ate the phobia chicken after killing it or whether or not it scavenged the carcass, Link mentioned. If the chicken was alive, it was probably attacked whereas ingesting at a river, researchers wrote, and conversely, if it was lifeless, the caiman discovered and ate up its physique close to water.

“This story will not be told completely as we have no further evidence to choose between these two hypotheses.” Link mentioned.

The discovery challenges the idea of “a linear relation between predators feeding on herbivores feeding in plants,” he added. “The food web is really much more complex.”

The decrease a part of the chicken’s left leg bone used within the research was unearthed within the famend La Venta fossil beds of Colombia 20 years in the past by Cesar Perdomo, a neighborhood paleontologist.