APEX PREDATOR
THE REIGN OF THE TERROR BIRDS:
After the Tertiary extinction wiped out the apex predators of the Mesozoic era 65 million years ago, a group of surviving avian dinosaurs evolved into the family of the terror birds.
Terror birds rose to occupy ecological niches in South America in a long supremacy that lasted for 60 million years before they went extinct 2.5 million years ago.
As birds are dinosaurs, the domination of dinosaurs never truly ended in South America until terror birds vanished. As saber-toothed cats and wolves dominated other ecological niches elsewhere, South America was an isolated island that was the home of mostly herbivores who were terrorised by these birds.
The more fossils were recovered, the more we learned about these birds. The fossils reveal that these birds were definitely carnivorous and possessed a rock hard skull, deadly beaks, creepy sounds and very strong feet. All of those made the family the rulers of that era. They pecked and kicked their prey
to death. Though, like most animals they came in all shapes and sizes reaching 2 to 3 meters maximum.
Up until 15 to 12 million years ago, Central America wasn't created yet and the 2 Americas were seperated, but when Central America was formed and the 2 Americas were linked, migration became possible both ways and that changed the game for terror birds with competition appearing out of the blue.
Terror birds' newest specie Titanis was a very large and adapted animal that migrated to North America and lived for over 7 million years there, the extinction of such an adapted family wasn't solely related to the new competition by predatory mammals but also by climate change that provoked a change of habitat and an inability to adapt, terror birds vanished alongside a lot of other species who couldn't handle the change during that time.
Meet the scariest birds you can imagine, scaled up to nightmarish proportions
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