This just in from
World Science:
As if the little fish of the ancient seas didn’t have enough terrifying predators to deal with, they also had to contend with duck-like birds, almost the size of small airplanes, and armed with tooth-like spikes.
That’s the claim of researchers who say these monstrous waterfowl once skimmed across the ocean waters over what is now the London region. Giving “mother goose” a whole new meaning, the relatives of duck and geese had five-metre (15-foot) wingspans, according to the scientists.
A newfound skull of one of the animals, dated as 50 million years old, is described Sept. 26 in the research journal Palaeontology.
It belongs to Dasornis, a bony-toothed bird, or pelagornithid, researchers said, and was discovered in the London Clay that lies under much of London, Essex and northern Kent in southeastern U.K.
That such birds lie in these deposits has been long known, but the new fossil is one of the best skulls yet found, and reveals previously unknown anatomical details, according to the researchers.
The birds were similar to albatross in their way of ife, the investigators said. Albatross have the larg est wingspan of any living bird, but that of Dasornis was over 40 percent greater. Despite these similarities, the latest research suggests that the closest living relatives of Dasornis and its fossil kin are ducks and geese, according to the scientists.
“By today’s standards these were pretty bizarre animals, but perhaps the strangest thing about them is that they had sharp, tooth-like projections along the cutting edges of the beak,” said Gerald Mayr of the German Senckenberg Research Institute and author of the report.
Like all living birds, Dasornishad a beak made of keratin, the same substance as our hair and fingernails, but it also had these bony “pseudo-teeth,” he added.
“No living birds have true teeth—which are made of enamel and dentine—because their distant ancestors did away with them more than 100 million years ago, probably to save weight and make flying easier,” Mayr continued.
“But the bony-toothed birds, like Dasornis, are unique among birds in that they reinvented tooth-like structures by evolving these bony spikes.”
“These birds probably skimmed across the surface of the sea, snapping up fish and squid on the wing. With only an ordinary beak these would have been difficult to keep hold of, and the pseudo-teeth evolved to prevent meals slipping away.”
Formerly Known As Frukathka 
