Is it possible that it was she who was the basis of the legends about giant birds attacking people, which can be found in the legends of many peoples of the world?
The remains of a previously unknown bird were found in southeast England at the mouth of the Thames. British researchers immediately drew attention to the gigantic dimensions of the prehistoric bird - the skull of the find several times exceeds the volume of the skull of modern ducks and geese, whose single ancestor, in their opinion, is, and the wingspan of the ancient bird reached 5 meters. According to scientists, the bird belongs to the extinct Darsonis family. The age of the find is estimated at 50 million years.
“Imagine a bird like the 'ocean goose', the size of which is the size of a small one-seater plane! By today's standards and standards, this individual seems extremely strange, but from a scientific point of view, there is nothing strange about such a giant. The only odd thing about it is the presence of teeth, or rather, tooth-shaped incisors at the edges of the beak,”says Gerald Mayr, a scientist at the Senckenberg Research Institute in Germany.
British experts say that in the UK, in particular in the counties of Essex and northern Kent, also found the remains of "toothy birds", and the archaeological layers of these finds correspond to the layer in which the new remains of the progenitor of ducks and geese were found. Experts note that the presence of teeth in birds could have been the norm earlier, but today it is not, and this speaks of previously unknown stages of evolution.
Like modern birds, Darsonis had a beak made of keratin (the hair and nails of humans are made of this substance), but unlike modern birds, which use the beak more as a means of carrying or getting food, he also used it as a means of chewing food, then the case included his teeth, consisting of enamel and dentine.
According to Gerald Mayr, modern birds have significantly decreased in size during evolution and "abandoned" teeth in order to reduce body weight, which must be lifted into the air with the help of wings. As for Darsonis, with his 5-meter wings, the weight of his teeth was a mere trifle for him.