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Koala-hunting eagle terrorized Australia 25 million years ago - Livescience.com
Sep 27, 2021 1 min, 42 secs

Paleontologists discovered 63 fossilized bones from the ancient koala-hunter in 2016, while on an expedition to Lake Pinpa, a salt lake east of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.

After thoroughly examining the bones, the team recently named the newfound eagle species Archaehierax sylvestris.

"As apex predators, eagles and hawks are less abundant than the species they prey on," first author Ellen Mather, a doctoral student at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told Live Science in an email.

"This tends to carry over into the fossil record, as there are fewer chances an individual from these species will be fossilized." .

And when they are found, eagle fossils often include very few bones — or sometimes only one — making the newfound fossil, with its 63 bones, an exceptionally rare find, the authors noted in their report.

Nowadays, Lake Pinpa, where the fossil was found, rarely holds any water and sits within a landscape of sand dunes sparsely adorned with grass and trees.

sylvestris soared through the skies, the lake looked strikingly different, senior author Trevor Worthy, a vertebrate paleontologist and associate professor at Flinders University, told Live Science in an email. .

At that time, the Lake Pinpa excavation site sat on the shore of a larger lake, or lake system, which extended for about 62 miles (100 kilometers) through a temperate rainforest.

"Lake Pinpa, as a whole, is the most rich fossil site for this time period in South Australia," Worthy said.

Among the first bone fragments they excavated, the team found claws and a lower leg bone called a tarsometatarsus; these bones revealed that the specimen was an eagle, but at that time, they didn't know which species.

Based on these features, as well as the age of the Lake Pinpa site, the team concluded that the bird belonged to a previously unknown subfamily and species of eagle.

"We can be confident that the fossil represents a new species as the only other eagle species of a similar age, Pengana robertbolesi from Riversleigh, Queensland, has a very different morphology from Archaehierax," Mather said. .

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