Terror bird may have been killed by even bigger creature 13 million years ago, bite marks suggest

With a giant beak, the terror bird would have proved a formidable foe for most. Paleontologists think it may have been killed by a crocodile-like creature.

Standing around 10 feet tall, weighing around 220 pounds and with an axe-like beak capable of delivering devastating strikes, the terror bird would have proved a formidable foe for most creatures.

But around 13 million years ago, one of them may have fallen prey to an even larger creature, a team of paleontologists in Colombia have discovered after examining bite marks in a fossilized bone of one of the fearsome birds.

Publishing their findings in the peer-reviewed scientific journal “Biology Letters,” the team hypothesized that it was killed and eaten or consumed through scavenging by a medium sized caiman, a crocodile-like reptile.

“This is a fascinating story of the interaction of two very iconic animals in the past,” Andrés Link, the study’s lead author, told NBC News in an email Wednesday. “We actually found not only the first record of a terror bird in northern south America, but the tooth marks of a large caiman that has probably fed on it,” he added.

Terror bird fossils, which are rare, have mostly been identified in the southern part of the continent.