"The Murderous 10-Foot-Tall Bird With a Beak Like a Pickax" Topic
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Tango01 | 14 Mar 2014 11:33 a.m. PST |
"You'd be forgiven for looking at a pigeon and straining to believe that its ancestors were dinosaurs. This is a creature, after all, that descended from some of the finest killing machines evolution has ever produced to now drink gutter water and assault old people for bread crumbs. But millions of years before birds were bumming for handouts in parks, they had risen right to the top of the food chain. In fact, they filled the vacated niches of their menacing theropod forebears like Velociraptor. These are the terror birds: scrappy, powerful critters that drove their enormous hooked beaks through small mammals as easily as that guy who put a pickax through my crazy uncle's skull in a bar fight that one time (he survived, and no, I'm not even kidding). The 18 known species, the tallest growing to a staggering 10 feet tall, didn't bother with flying, instead opting to chase down all those creatures that had only just thrown their good-riddance-to-the-massive-carnivorous-dinosaurs party. The poor things woke up with a hangover, and the hangover was the terror bird. It was 60 million years ago in South America, which had not yet joined with its northern counterpart, where the terror birds rose to power in isolation as apex predators. Even given their success, their fossils are fragmentary and extremely rare, according to paleontologist Luis Chiappe, who in 2007 described the titanic, strangely boxy noggin of the biggest terror bird ever: Kelenken, named after the fearsome bird spirit of Patagonia's native Tehuelche people
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Full article here. link Amicalement Armand |
Brian Smaller | 14 Mar 2014 11:59 a.m. PST |
You can just see warriors riding these in a fantasy game. |
Tango India Mike | 14 Mar 2014 12:24 p.m. PST |
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elsyrsyn | 14 Mar 2014 12:26 p.m. PST |
You can just see warriors riding these in a fantasy game. Perhaps with lances? Doug |
Space Monkey | 14 Mar 2014 2:51 p.m. PST |
Maidenhead makes their line of warrior women on terror birds
though the birds are a bit more elongated than the one here. |
Grelber | 14 Mar 2014 3:14 p.m. PST |
I have two of the diatryma terror birds Copplestone used to make. I painted them based on the coloring of emus, though ultimately I couldn't stand all the browns and ended up giving them red eye patches. I pretty much blew off suggestions that these might have been salad bar types--mine are man eaters! Terror bird lancers,with trained war birds. Maybe these have VSF possibilities, too. I'm thinking of the movie Young Winston, with the charge of the 21st Lancers on terror birds! Good find, Tango. These South American birds are even bigger than my Copplestone birds! Grelber |
M C MonkeyDew | 14 Mar 2014 3:53 p.m. PST |
I always knew Big Bird would be exposed for the fiend he is one day
"The Murderous 10-Foot-Tall Bird With a Beak Like a Pickax" |
rvandusen | 15 Mar 2014 7:17 a.m. PST |
If Kelenken was still around, and I lived near them, I would have a Kelenken feeder in my back yard. |
Tango01 | 15 Mar 2014 10:59 a.m. PST |
Glad you enjoyed the article boys. Amicalement Armand |
ochoin | 21 Mar 2014 4:07 a.m. PST |
@Mishima Sheldor's Battle Ostrich? LOL |
Tango01 | 25 Mar 2014 10:29 p.m. PST |
Here they are!
From here. link Hope you enjoy!. Amicalement Armand |
ochoin | 28 Mar 2014 6:25 a.m. PST |
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BlackWidowPilot | 02 Apr 2014 8:35 a.m. PST |
Terror bird lancers,with trained war birds. Maybe these have VSF possibilities, too. I'm thinking of the movie Young Winston, with the charge of the 21st Lancers on terror birds! Why is it that I had no trouble at all imagining just such a scene, with the Dervishes panicking like scared bunnies once they became fully aware of the nature of the 21st's mounts?
What I can also picture on such mounts with equal ease are French Chasseurs de Afrique or Spahis (with much the same negative morale impact on their opponents)
Leland R. Erickson Metal Express metal-express.net
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