New Zealand today is home to a number of physically impressive parrots. Kakapo, the heaviest psittacines alive, are too chubby to fly. Sharp-beaked keas are strong enough to attack sheep and yank rubber parts off cars.

Once upon a time, though, there was a prehistoric Polly in New Zealand who had them all beat. This bruiser of a bird — whose discovery was announced Wednesday in Biology Letters — was perhaps three feet tall. At about 15.4 pounds, it was as heavy as some bowling balls, and twice as massive as the kakapo, which had previously held the record. That’s a lot of crackers.

“To have a parrot that big is surprising,” said Trevor Worthy, a vertebrate paleontologist at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia and the paper’s lead author. “This thing was way outside of expectations.”

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The parrot’s bones were found near St Bathans on New Zealand’s South Island, where fossil deposits are filled with creatures from the early Miocene, a period that spanned 19 million to 16 million years ago.