The Perspectives series returns! This was posted a few weeks back on my Patreon, available to $2 and $10 supporters!
"Eating a Dead Horse" Argentavis/Barbourofelis/Protohippus Neogene, 7 million years ago, Ambelodon Quarry She was blown off course by a strong wind a few days back, and made it across to North America. Hungry and a bit confused, she immediately looked for a food source. A rodent, lagomorph, maybe even a small ungulate would do, but the first thing her senses picked up was a dead Protohippus killed by three Babourofelis. They were formidable predators, for sure. Saber teeth and a family group would make them a force to be reckoned with. But they hadn't ever encountered the argent bird. A body less than two meters tall suddenly became six times larger in the flash of a second. Blood rushed into the monster's face, neon rays crowned its head, and it shrieked like nothing they had ever heard before. Ten seconds was all it took for them to run.
Argentavis was the heaviest flying bird ever to exist. The greatest of the teratorns, it had a wingspan of almost twenty feet, which it could have used to effortlessly soar over the plains. Now, teratorns are popularly believed to be scavengers; for most of them, however, it's probably not the case owing to skull morphology more suited to gulping down small prey. Long, strong limbs allowed them to stalk the plains while simultaneously allowing them to spring their heavy bodies straight into the air if needed. Argentavis presumably shares a lot of these adaptations, but recent studies of its neuroanatomy imply that it had a brain more similar to a scavenger bird. I've chosen to depict it engaging in an act of kleptoparasitism, deploying a variety of bells and whistles to intimidate even the top predators of the environment, but I like to think this guy can retract her yellow tassels into her aeroshell feathers to overall reduce her obviousness when stalking prey. Babourofelis is the not-cat here, a big nimravid, rather. It convergently evolved saber teeth just like so many other predators who found it advantageous to shank prey with a pair of knives, and likely lived in family groups. While Babourofelis is a North American animal, birds are very much capable of travelling long distances in the wrong direction, and that's exactly what is happening here. Next up: Slothtime.
