Captions provided by CCTubes – Captioning the Internet! About 5 million years ago, a new predator made its way from the south and onto the coastal plains of North America. It was a giant, flightless, carnivorous bird and came to be known by one of the coolest and most richly earned nicknames in all of paleontology: the terror bird.
Correction! Thanks to Ben Creisler for pointing out that at 4:10, we mixed up the Paleogene Period with the Neogene Period. We regret the error and hope you still find these birds as terrifying as we do.
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References:
http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/2/8/e1600883
https://www.britannica.com/place/Gondwana-supercontinent
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20150727-the-reign-of-the-terror-birds
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2006/10/terror-birds-bigger-and-faster
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/new-species-terror-bird-discovered
http://hoopermuseum.earthsci.carleton.ca/flightless/phorus.htm
https://www.livescience.com/40311-pleistocene-epoch.html
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/florida-vertebrate-fossils/species/titanis-walleri
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6313741.stm
https://neotropical.birds.cornell.edu/Species-Account/nb/species/relser1/overview
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=4073
https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/files/6313/9447/0040/bulletin-gouldquitmyerlowres.pdf
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40035724
http://www.bio-nica.info/Biblioteca/MacFadden2007TerrorBirdsRedated.pdf
https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/24942595.pdf
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/geb.12504/abstract
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0011856
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/272/1574/1769
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/08/0801_050801_terrorbirds.html