Largest bird wingspan1/1/2024 ![]() sandersi may have gotten off the ground by running downhill into a headwind or taking advantage of air gusts to get aloft, much like a hang glider. Like Argentavis, whose flight was described by a computer simulation study in 2007, P. sandersi was probably too big to take off simply by flapping its wings and launching itself into the air from a standstill, analyses show. To find out, Ksepka fed the fossil data into a computer program designed to predict flight performance given various estimates of mass, wingspan and wing shape. But because it exceeded what some mathematical models say is the maximum body size possible for flying birds, what was less clear was how it managed to take off and stay aloft despite its massive size. ![]() It's paper-thin hollow bones, stumpy legs and giant wings would have made it at home in the air but awkward on land. Daniel Ksepka, Curator of Science at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich, CT, studies the skull of Pelagornis sandersi, the world's largest-ever flying bird. Named ' Pelagornis sandersi' in honor of retired Charleston Museum curator Albert Sanders, who led the fossil's excavation, the bird lived 25 to 28 million years ago-after the dinosaurs died out but long before the first humans arrived in the area.ĭr. Its sheer size and telltale beak allowed Ksepka 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. Now in the collections at the Charleston Museum, the strikingly well-preserved specimen consisted of multiple wing and leg bones and a complete skull. "The upper wing bone alone was longer than my arm," said author Dan Ksepka of the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center in Durham, North Carolina. The specimen was so big they had to dig it out with a backhoe. The new fossil was first unearthed in 1983 near Charleston, South Carolina, when construction workers began excavations for a new terminal at the Charleston International Airport.
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