A 50 million year old skull reveals that huge birds with a 5 metre wingspan once skimmed across the waters that covered what is now London, Essex and Kent. These giant ocean-going relatives of ducks and geese also had a rather bizarre attribute for a bird: their beaks were lined with bony-teeth.

It may be a few weeks until the British pantomine season kicks-off, but this new fossil from the Isle of Sheppey is giving ‘Mother Goose’ an entirely new meaning. Described today (September 26) in the journal Palaeontology, the skull belongs to Dasornis, a bony-toothed bird, or pelagornithid, and was discovered in the London Clay, which lies under much of London, Essex and northern Kent in SE England. The occurrence of bony-toothed birds in these deposits has been known for a long time, but the new fossil is one the best skulls ever found, and preserves previously unknown details of the anatomy of these strange creatures.

With a five metre wingspan, these huge birds were similar to albatross in their way of life. Albatross have the largest wingspan of any living bird, but that of Dasornis was over a meter and half greater. Despite these similarities, the latest research suggests that the closest living relatives of Dasornis and its fossil kin are ducks and geese.

“Imagine a bird like an ocean-going goose, almost the size of a small plane! By today’s standards these were pretty bizarre animals, but perhaps the strangest thing about them is that they had sharp, tooth-like projections along the cutting edges of the beak” explains Gerald Mayr, expert palaeornithologist at the German Senckenberg Research Institute and author of the report. Like all living birds Dasornis had a beak made of keratin, the same substance as our hair and fingernails, but it also had these bony ‘pseudo-teeth’ “No living birds have true teeth - which are made of enamel and dentine - because their distant ancestors did away with them more than 100 million years ago, probably to save weight and make flying easier. But the bony-toothed birds, like Dasornis, are unique among birds in that they reinvented tooth-like structures by evolving these bony spikes.” So why did Dasornis have these pseudo-teeth? “Its linked to diet” says Mayr, “these birds probably skimmed across the surface of the sea, snapping up fish and squid on the wing. With only an ordinary beak these would have been difficult to keep hold of, and the pseudo-teeth evolved to prevent meals slipping away.”

The fossil belongs to the collection of the Karlsruhe Natural History Museum

Peer reviewed publication: The paper, “A skull of the giant bony-toothed bird Dasornis (Aves: Pelagornithidae) from the Lower Eocene of the Isle of Sheppey” by Gerald Mayr is published in the September 26th issue of Palaeontology.