I really don't care if the name "Squawkzilla" was pure click-bait. I bit on it, hard.
Scientists Discover Prehistoric Giant 'Squawkzilla' Parrot, As Big As Small Child
Scientists Discover Prehistoric Giant 'Squawkzilla' Parrot, As Big As Small Child
NPR said:Scientists are adding a new creature to a list of giant, prehistoric animals that were previously unknown: The Heracles inexpectus, a supersize parrot, estimated to have been as tall as a small human child, was discovered by Australian researchers in New Zealand, according to a study published in Biology Letters.
Bones of the bird, somewhere between 16 and 19 million years old, were discovered in a now extinct lake in St. Bathans in 2008. But the fossilized tibiotarsi, essentially the bird's drumsticks, sat on a shelf for nearly a decade before a graduate student took a closer look. She realized the bones had been misidentified as an enormous, possibly human-eating eagle — which wouldn't have been groundbreaking in the ornithological world, Trevor Worthy, the study's lead researcher, told NPR.
Instead, Worthy, who is a paleontologist at Flinders University, figured out the leg bones are evidence of the largest parrot known to science — now nicknamed "Squawkzilla."
"The realization that these were parrots was astonishing, because nowhere has such a large parrot been found before," Worthy said. Prior to his discovery, New Zealand's kakapo was believed to be the largest.
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