Daily Dose of Prehistory Revival 29: Gastornis parisiensis

Gastornis parisiensis, named after and discovered by French physicist Gaston Planté, was a species of large flightless bird that lived in the Paleocene and Eocene epochs about 56 to 45 million years ago in what is now Western Europe, China, and the Western US. Despite its large height of 6 feet and 7 inches and its robust skull and neck, it was not predatory like the Phorusrachids of South America that it superficially resembled (which are, as of 2020, the only known exclusively carnivorous flightless birds). In fact Gastornis was likely fully herbivorous, using its robust skull to crack open seeds and nuts. It's unknown why the various Gastornis species including G. parisiensis went extinct as they coexisted with large mammals for quite some time and also survived the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum with little change, though the European species survived longer than the others due to the fact that Europe was still more or less a archipelago at the time.

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