A ‘Cannibal’ Giant Owl That Lived 40 Thousand Years Ago – Found In Ecuador

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – A new species of giant predator owl about 70 centimeters high and a wingspan of 1.5 meters was found in Ecuador.

This new species that was named Asio ecuadoriensis, had “the legs of the giant owl were long and thin, effective in capturing prey that is difficult to subdue,” Gastón Lo Coco, a researcher at the Laboratorio de Anatomía Comparada y Evolución de Vertebrados of the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales said to the CTyS-UNLaM Agency.

Tarsometatarsus of Asio ecuadoriensis. Illustration: Sebastián Rozadilla.

The owl was found in a small cave located in the Chimborazo province in the Ecuadorian Andes, at 2800 meters above sea level, and represents the first of its kind discovered in South America.

The discovery was made during excavations conducted between 2009 and 2012 by the Biology Department of the Escuela Politécnica Nacional in Quito, Ecuador.

The place of discovery is one of the most important fossiliferous localities of Ecuador, known by the name of Quebrada Chalán. There, fossilized bones of micro-mammals, birds, and, in particular, owls were found that had been the food of what appeared to be a great predator. To the paleontologists’ surprise, the great predator it was nothing more or less than a giant owl.

“One of its peculiarities is that, apparently, it had a predilection for consuming other smaller owls”, said Dr. Federico Agnolin, co-author of the study published in the scientific journal Journal of Ornithology, adding the species is “a biological rarity”.

Tarsometatarsus of Asio ecuadoriensis. Illustration: Sebastián Rozadilla.

The paleontologist José Luis Román Carrión of the Museo de Historia Natural de la Escuela Politécnica of Quito detailed: “In this site, we were lucky to find ancient roosts of raptors, which were covered by sediments, among which were fossil remains of mice, shrews, rabbits and a lot of bird material”.

“What is striking is that the remains of all these microfossils have typical wear that causes the digestion of birds of prey on these bones”, said Lo Coco. And he explained: “Therefore, we proposed that all the remains of the other species would belong to the prey of this great owl”.

In the remains of that ancient cave, four species of owls were found. Three of them correspond to species that currently exist (Glaucidium sp., Tyto furcata and Athene cunicularia), while the fourth is the cannibal owl, which dominated the other rest, but did not survive until today.

In these localities, there are fossil remains in hardened volcanic ash between 20 thousand and 42 thousand years old, in what corresponds to the Late Pleistocene. 40 thousand years ago, at 2,800 meters above sea level where that owl lived, there was a wasteland.

“Currently, the páramos in Ecuador are more than 4,000 meters high, but back then they were at a much lower altitude because it was the end of the Ice Age and the climate was much colder”, Román Carrión analyzed.

Until about 10,000 years before the present, throughout all of South America, huge mammals such as glyptodonts, giant sloths, mastodons and saber-toothed tigers lived. In the case of birds, it is much more difficult for their fossil remains to be preserved because their bones are hollow and brittle.

“Based on the remains that we have preserved, we calculate that it would be between 70 and 80 centimeters height”, said the researcher Federico Agnolin.

When there are modifications in the environment, large birds of prey are more affected than small birds that have many offspring and do not need large extensions for their survival.

“We think that the climate change that occurred about 10,000 years ago, when the Ice Age ended, was partly responsible for the extinction of these large predatory birds of which they remain in currently very few species, such as the great eagles of the forests and the Andean condors”, concluded Dr. Agnolin.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff