Today's News, Tomorrow's Lesson - July 14, 2014

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Any confusion is not entirely unreasonable.

A newly discovered prehistoric bird was in fact only slightly smaller than a two-seater airplane. Pelagornis sandersi had a wingspan of between 20 and 24 feet, which makes it the largest flying bird yet discovered.

Pelagornis sandersi also had stumpy legs and a mouth filled with strange, bony spikes, which made it look like a dragon, according to Dan Ksepka, the paleontologist who pieced together its bones.

“This was a remarkable fossil,” Dr. Ksepka said. “Almost like something out of Game of Thrones. There is simply nothing like them around today.”

The bird’s bones were unearthed in 1983, during the expansion of Charleston airport in South Carolina. It has been named after Albert Sanders, the curator at Charleston Museum who led the original excavation.

The bones then spent almost three decades in a drawer at the museum, until they were rediscovered by Dr. Ksepka, then of North Carolina State University.

Not afraid of skeletons in closets, Dr. Ksepka pieced together the bird’s skull, shoulder blade, leg and wing bones. He then extrapolated its mass, wingspan and wing shape.

These findings were fed into a computer program, which estimated how the bird might have flown. This suggested that, like the modern albatross, the prehistoric bird was an efficient glider, and would barely have needed to flap its wings in order to keep moving. It would probably have reached speeds of up to 37mph.

But the 48 pound bird would have struggled to take off. It was too heavy, and its feet too small to run on water like a goose or swan. Its mass was too great, meanwhile, for its wing muscles to flap sufficiently to achieve take-off. “I think they just waited on the beach for a strong wind to carry them aloft,” Dr. Ksepka said.

Once in flight, the bird would have used the spikes in its beak to spear prey, such as other birds. Such spikes are, in fact, significantly less rare than one would think. Similar “toothed” birds lived between 55 and 3 million years ago.

Pelagornis sandersi is likely to have lived between 25 and 28 million years ago. Other oversized prehistoric birds include Argentavis magnificens, which lived 6 million years ago and had a wingspan of 18 to 23 feet.

The royal albatross, the largest flying bird alive, has a wingspan of around 10 feet. A Cessna airplane, by contrast, has a wingspan of around 33 feet.