Agiantextinct flightless bird will greet New Haven visitors when Yale Peabody Museum reopens

Jul. 24—The bird is a member of the genus gastornis, and it stands at about 8 feet tall.

Though the creature went extinct about 45 million years ago, New Haveners will soon be able to get up close and personal with this "big bird" without the help of a time machine.

When the Yale Peabody Museum reopens next year after renovations are completed, a to-scale lifelike model of gastornis, complete with real feathers, will be there to meet visitors.

A large flightless bird, the gastornis emerged about 60 million years ago in the wake of the extinction of the big dinosaurs, according to Michael Hanson, a paleontologist who consulted on the creation of the museum's gastornis model alongside Yale paleontologist and museum curator Jacques Gauthier.

Gastornis bones have been found in North America, Europe and Asia, Hanson said, and the bird's range appears to have stretched across the Northern Hemisphere.

Long thought to be a "terror bird" that hunted down prey, recent discoveries suggest gastornis more likely ate seeds and plant matter, according to Hanson. The creature belongs to a group of birds known as Galloanserae, whose living members include ducks, geese, chickens and turkeys.

Scientists believe birds in the gastornis genus stood at about 7 or 8 feet tall and weighed about 400 pounds, Hanson said, adding that there was some variability in height.

The Peabody's gastornis is 8 feet tall, a height based on the 24-inch gastornis tibia in the Peabody's collection, according to museum staff.

The model was created by Blue Rhino Studio, a company based in Minnesota that, according to cofounder Tim Quady, supplies sculpted creatures ranging from giant dinosaurs to tiny lizards for institutions around the world.

In designing the gastornis model, Jim Burt, the studio's lead sculptor, consulted with a team of paleontologists and museum staff.

The bird is probably the most scientifically informed gastornis model in the world, according to Kailen Rogers, associate director of exhibitions for the Peabody.

Burt, who took a break from painting a Tyrannosaurus rex to speak with a reporter, said his first step in creating gastornis was to build a small clay model of the bird, which was then critiqued for massing.

Once everyone was happy with the result, "we scan that model and we size it to the proportions that it would be in real life," Burt said.

The life-size gastornis was CNC routed out of foam, he said. (CNC routing is a process that uses a computer-controlled machine to sculpt materials.)

After the team at Blue Rhino Studios put a hard shell over the foam, the model could be painted feathered. That step brought another challenge: Burt had to find a way to source thousands of feathers for the creature's plumage, he said.

"There's all kinds of different types of feathers, all manipulated to look a certain way so that there's coherence when you put them all together," Burt said. "You basically try to get them from whatever source you can."

The sculptor needed so many feathers that he was buying out suppliers, he said.

"It was difficult to find that many feathers from one source," Burt said. "I was hunting all over the place."

The primary type of feather used for the Peabody's gastornis came from rheas, according to Burt, who said their feathers are probably the closest modern analogues to the extinct bird's feathers.

That conclusion is based on a fossilized feather found in Wyoming, according to Hanson. Though scientists can't say for sure that it belonged to gastornis, they do not know of any other bird of that size living in Wyoming during the correct time period, he said.

Rhea feathers have a similar size and texture as the fossil feather, Hanson said.

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Other conversations during the design process covered everything from the proper squishiness of gastornis' toes to a debate over whether its legs should have a "chicken-oid" or "duck-oid" pattern, said Susan Butts, director of collections and research at the Peabody.

Hanson advised the team to add padding to the model's feet because, like an elephant, that padding would likely have been needed to support the bird's weight. Larger birds, such as ostriches, tend to have fleshier pads beneath their toes, he said.

As for the question of chicken or duck, "there's different patterning to scales on the feet and the legs amongst different birds," said Hanson. "We were kind of debating on which way we wanted to go with this."

In the end, he believes the team chose a pattern that more closely resembled the one found on a duck or goose, he said.

"It's mostly because the current hypothesis is gastornis is slightly more related to ducks and geese than they are to chickens, quails and the like," Hanson said. "There is some debate about that."

Recent scientific discoveries have changed the thinking around the bird's lifestyle. In older illustrations, gastornis has often been pictured hunting down horses.

But due to a number of factors, the creature is now believed to have been an herbivore. If you consider the bird's form, it wasn't built well for running, according to Hanson.

Gastornis also lacked the features common in today's birds of prey, such as large talons, a hooked beak and big, forward-facing eyes, Hanson said. Gastornis' eyes are small and set far apart, he said.

What, then, was the purpose of gastornis' bulky beak? It probably helped the bird crack seeds.

Thanks to markings in gastornis jaw, researchers have determined the bird had large jaw muscles and could eat hard-shelled foods, Butts said.

A final piece of the gastornis puzzle came in the 2010s, when scientists analyzed the isotopic composition of its bones, Hanson said.

The analyses "seem to indicate that it wasn't eating any animal matter, it was primarily eating plant matter," Hanson said.

On Thursday, as museum staff introduced visitors to the Peabody's gastornis, Rogers, the associate director of exhibitions, propped a coconut inside its open beak.

"This is part of our storytelling strategy," she said. The coconut should tell visitors that while the bird may look scary, "it's not here to eat you."

Museum curators plan to station gastornis just inside the entrance to the hall that will be known as World of Change.

World of Change stands adjacent to the Burke Hall of Dinosaurs, and the doorway between the rooms meant to represent a mass extinction.

"This doorway is going to mark the asteroid impact that kills all the big dinosaurs," Rogers said. In World of Change, "it's a few million years after the asteroid impact, and life is recalibrating."

As visitors leave the dinosaur hall, they will see the head of the gastornis peeking out at them, beckoning them into the next room.