THE dinosaurs are long dead. This is the age of the mammals. And this is Australia. So what’s big enough and fearsome enough to chase a hungry marsupial lion away from its kill? Wait for it-a duck.
Clearly this is no ordinary duck. It is almost 3 metres tall, with legs like tree trunks, a body like a tank and a head the size of a horse’s-with a terrible beak. Meet the demon duck of doom.
Strictly speaking, the monstrous bird isn’t exactly a duck, but it is close family. As for the rest of its nickname-Steve Wroe, a palaeontologist at the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum, thinks it fits the bill. He is in no doubt that this bird ate flesh. “The beak was a huge pair of secateurs that could scissor out chunks of meat,” he says. “It could hook into your thigh and rip out a nice slab of meat quite easily.”
This awesome bird is Bullockornis planei, a 300-kilogram giant that terrorised the rainforests of Australia’s Northern Territory 15 million years ago. Bullockornis belonged to a uniquely Australian family of extinct flightless birds called the dromornithids, or thunder birds. These huge birds were once some of the most conspicuous members of the Australian fauna. They lived on the continent from at least 24 million years ago until 50 000 years ago and perhaps more recently still. The last of the family, Genyornis newtoni, almost certainly overlapped with the first humans.
Since the discovery of the first huge leg bone in the 1830s, fossil hunters have unearthed eight species. Some were not much bigger than…