Look out, Big Bird.

A Connecticut paleontologist has identified the earth’s largest-ever flying bird.



Paleontologist Dan Ksepka examines the bird's fossilized skull. Its telltale beak allowed him to identify the find as a previously unknown species of pelagornithid, an extinct group of giant seabirds known for bony tooth-like spikes that lined their upper and lower jaws.

Courtesy Dan Ksepka

Or, as he describes it, “a dragon, basically.”

The Pelagornis sandersi, which lived 25 to 28 million years ago, boasted a wingspan of 20 to 24 feet – twice as long as the biggest birds alive today, the California condor and Royal albatross, or roughly as long as a school bus packed full of small children.

And with an enormous hinged beak filled by rows of needle-shaped “pseduoteeth” made of bone, this was no cuddly Sesame Street character.

“It would be a startling sight – blacking out the sun as you’re looking up. It would’ve been a fantastic animal,” says Dan Ksepka, curator of science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. “It would’ve been just frightening.”

Its skull was huge, packed not with teeth made of enamel and dentyne like ours or those of other animals, but instead sharp protrusions from the jawbone, likely covered with a thin layer of beak tissue, similar to what’s on a duck’s bill. With these, it most likely munched on the fish, squid and other soft-bodied animals that swam amid the ocean waters covering what is now North and South Carolina.

“Those teeth are very pointy, they’re made for piercing and holding. They’re not meant for chewing and slicing, so they’re not for very tough things,” Ksepka says. “You impale it, you’ve got it hooked in, and then you sort of maneuver it and swallow at your leisure.”

The bird was found in 1983, as Charleston International Airport was undergoing an expansion. Spotted by James Malcom, a volunteer at the Charleston Museum, the specimen was so large that it had to be dug out by backhoe. Rather than be placed on display, though, it was put in storage at the museum, where it waited in a drawer 30 years.

It wasn’t until museum curator Albert Sanders invited Ksepka, an expert in penguin fossils and other ancient bird remains, to take a look at some of the specimens that the giant bird re-emerged.



The specimen of the Pelagornis sandersi had multiple wing and leg bones, as well as a complete skull. The bird's wings, compared to a California condor, bottom left, and a royal albatross, bottom right, stretched as far as 24 feet, or roughly three Michael Jordans. Liz Bradford

“I just opened a drawer and was astounded. The size was just so tremendous,” Ksepka says. “Al had done a lot of work with whales, but not being a specialist in birds, he had kind of put it on the back burner.”

He later named the bird for Sanders, placing an "i" at the end for the formal Latinization. Translated, it means "Sanders Marine Bird."

As with other birds, the species' bones were hollow, making them lighter for flight. A computer program, which analyzed the bird's estimated wingspan, weight and wing shape 24 different times, confirmed that the species would have soared – perhaps as fast as 40 mph.

With wings so long, though, what remained unclear was how exactly it achieved liftoff – the wings were simply too long to flap fast enough from a standstill to get airborne. Ksepka suspects that the bird, like the previous largest-flying-bird record-holder Argentavis magnificens (wingspan: 22 feet, or about three Michael Jordans), might have run downhill into a headwind or simply waited for a wind gust to take to the air.

“We wish we could put it in a wind tunnel,” Ksepka says. “There’s really nothing like it today.”