PORTSMOUTH, England, Aug. 10 (UPI) -- A giant jawbone found in Kazakhstan is strong evidence giant birds roamed, or flew above, Earth at the same time as dinosaurs, paleontologists say.
Researchers writing in the journal Biology Letters say the bird species, Samrukia nessovi, had a skull almost 12 inches long, twice as long as that of an ostrich, the largest bird on Earth today.
"This fossil is only known from its lower jaw, so unfortunately we can't say anything at all with certainty about the shape and form of the whole animal," Darren Naish of the University of Portsmouth told the BBC.
"If it was flightless and sort of ostrich-shaped, it would have been maybe 2-3 meters (6 to 9 feet) tall and somewhere over 50kg (110 pounds)," he said. "If it was a flying animal, then maybe it was shaped like a big albatross or a condor."
The find is only the second bird of such a large size from the Cretaceous geologic period.
"I think the really interesting thing is that they're living alongside the big dinosaurs we know were around at the time: big tyrannosaurs, long-necked sauropods, duck-billed dinosaurs," Naish said. "That opens up loads of questions about ecological interactions that we can only speculate about.
"People have said there weren't big birds when there were big pterosaurs, but now we know there were."
