Europe was home to giant birds 1.8 million years ago Andrey Atuchin

A giant flightless bird that rivalled enormous moas and elephant birds lived in Europe 1.8 million years ago – just as the first hominins migrated to the continent from Africa.

Last summer, Nikita Zelenkov at the Borissiak Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow discovered a thigh bone, or femur, in Taurida cave on the Crimean peninsula. “It was found on the bottom of the cave, which was a den of ancient hyenas,” says Zelenkov.

The bone belonged to a bird and was 75 centimetres long. Based on its size, the team estimates that the bird weighed about 450 kilograms, three times as much as an ostrich. They have named it Pachystruthio dmanisensis.


Another thigh bone of similar size was found at Dmanisi in Georgia and described in 2013. It was initially thought to belong to a species closely related to a modern ostrich. However, Zelenkov’s team has re-examined it and concluded that it is a second specimen of P. dmanisensis. He says there are several other Eurasian bird bones that could be Pachystruthio.

Giants in the north

“It’s the first time these large birds have been reported in this area of the world,” says Delphine Angst of the University of Bristol, UK. No birds as large as P. dmanisensis were known from the northern hemisphere within the last 2.5 million years, she says.

Many giant flightless birds lived on Earth within the past few million years. South America was home to the carnivorous terror birds, New Zealand had the moas, and the “demon duck of doom” roamed Australia. The largest of all were the elephant birds of Madagascar, the heftiest of which may have weighed more than 600 kilograms. No such birds are known from Africa but that may be due to a lack of excavations.

Unlike these other birds, we know little about how P. dmanisensis lived. “We don’t know if they were herbivores or carnivores, because we don’t have any bones from the skull,” says Angst.

Zelenkov’s team points out that the thigh bone is relatively thin for such a large bone, suggesting the bird was a reasonably fast runner. However, Angst is unconvinced. “It’s like an elephant,” she says. It could probably run if it really had to, but spent most of its time walking.

Both researchers believe there are more fossils to be found. “We suspect a wide distribution at least across eastern Europe,” says Zelenkov. He says the birds may also have reached western Europe and Asia.

P. dmanisensis lived in eastern Europe just as some Homo erectus were moving out of Africa and into Europe and Asia – the first hominins to do so. We don’t know if the two species ever met. However, Angst points out that humans hunted moas in New Zealand and also took their eggs, so it is possible that H. erectus hunted P. dmanisensis for their meat.

Journal reference: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology , DOI: 10.1080/02724634.2019.1605521