After thoroughly examining the bones, the team named the newly discovered species of eagle Archehierax sylvestris. These ancient raptors have no direct descendants alive today.
Reported Live Science, Tuesday (28/9/2021), the bones found were from the Oligocene era, from 33.9 million to 23 million years ago. The A. sylvestris specimen represents the oldest eagle fossil ever found in Australia.
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“As apex predators, there are fewer species of eagles than they prey on. So there is little chance fossil they can be found,” first author Ellen Mather, a doctoral student at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia, told Live Science by email.
Today, Lake Pinpa holds very little water and sits within a sand dune landscape sparse with grass and trees. These conditions were different when millions of years ago when eagles ruled the region, senior author Trevor Worthy, a vertebrate paleontologist and professor at Flinders University, told Live Science in an email.
When Worthy’s team first discovered the fossil of A. sylvestris in 2016, they knew they had found something extraordinary. Among the first bone fragments they excavated, the team found claws and a lower leg bone called the tarsometatarsus which revealed that the specimen was an eagle.
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Though fossil eagles are generally hard to come by but at certain dig sites, fossils are relatively common, Mather said. For example, at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, fossils of eagles and other predators will be easy to find.
“However, this is not the case at Lake Pinpa, where there are no specific features of the environment that would favor the preservation of the predator’s fossils. We were fortunate to find this fossil,” Mather said.
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