A misidentified Diatryma skull from Germany’s Geiseltal region was rediscovered, confirming the rare bird’s herbivorous nature.
About 45 million years ago, a 4.6-foot-tall (1.40 meters) flightless bird known as Diatryma inhabited the Geiseltal region in what is now southern Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. An international research team, led by Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (MLU) and the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, has detailed the discovery of a fully preserved Diatryma skull in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
The fossil was originally unearthed in the 1950s in a former lignite mining area in the Geiseltal but was misclassified and largely overlooked for decades until its recent reexamination. Remarkably, the only other similar skull fossil has been found in the United States.
The Geiseltal region, located southwest of Halle, was an active lignite mining area until 1993. It is renowned for yielding numerous exceptionally well-preserved animal fossils. Today, the Geiseltal Collection at MLU houses around 50,000 fossils and is considered a national heritage asset.
These fossils offer unique insights into the evolution of animals and the Eocene Epoch around 45 million years ago. At that time, the Geiseltal was a warm, tropical swamp. Ancient horses, early tapirs, large land crocodiles as well as giant tortoises, lizards, and numerous birds lived here. Some of the latter were flightless and the largest of these was Diatryma, a herbivore with a gigantic beak which stood around 4.6 feet high.
Rediscovery of the Skull
For many years no one knew that an almost completely preserved skull of Diatryma was part of the collection. “The find was initially misidentified as a crocodile skull,” says Michael Stache, a geological preparator at MLU’s Central Repository of Natural Science Collections. Stache came across the fossil again by chance several years ago. He realized the mistake and got down to work, restoring and then analyzing the piece of skull.
He combined the fossil with another object from the collection, reconstructing an almost entire skull. Dr. Gerald Mayr, a researcher at the Senckenberg Institute, examined the find more closely and realized its importance: the skull clearly belonged to a Diatryma. Only one other fully preserved skull is known to exist in the world and is housed in the American Museum of Natural History in the USA.
“This shows once again that many of the most interesting discoveries in paleontology occur in museum collections. Just a few years ago, nobody would have thought that the Geiseltal Collection would contain such surprises,” says Gerald Mayr. Michael Stache also reports that there is great scientific interest in the fossils. Researchers from Germany and abroad come to MLU on a regular basis to investigate the objects. “This research expands our understanding of the Eocene Epoch in the Geiseltal even though the excavations were completed long ago,” says Michael Stache. Up until ten years ago, for example, it was assumed that Diatryma hunted prehistoric horses in the Geiseltal. More recent investigations have found that the bird was, in fact, a herbivore.
There are around 40 specimens of the bird in the Geiseltal Collection. “Diatryma was probably a rare guest in the Geisetal. Otherwise, there would probably be more fossils,” concludes Stache.
Reference: “Resurrecting the taxon Diatryma: A review of the giant flightless Eocene Gastornithiformes (Aves), with a report of the first skull of Diatryma geiselensis” by Gerald Mayr, Cécile Mourer-Chauviré, Estelle Bourdon and Michael Stache, 7 December 2024, Palaeontologia Electronica.
DOI: 10.26879/1438
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