They can also be extremely cute, and almost ‘cartoon-like’. At times, and from certain angles, they can appear rather menacing, peering down their long, razor sharp beak, with a hook at the tip. The shoebill bird is native to the marshes of East. If you hadn’t noticed, they are unusual and almost dinosaur like in appearance. I'm not sure if big storks will ever thrill us the way dinosaurs do, but I imagine Steven Spielberg working on it right now, conjuring hungry-eyed storks, creeping through the underbrush, nearer and nearer to the darling baby hobbit cooing by the fire, their giant beaks dripping with fake blood. If youre looking for a modern-day dinosaur, then the elusive shoebill stork might be the closest youll get. 'Prehistory is one of the few places where we can find monsters and let our imaginations run wild.' I bet you could smell one approaching though. This large birdit’s 5 feet talllooks like it would be right at home living amongst the dinosaurs. Since it shares features with storks, pelicans, hamerkop, and herons, it is rather difficult to classify. That is why, Switek thinks, we need to go back in time to find new ones. This bird, also called the shoe-billed stork or whale-headed stork, isn’t really a stork. We keep a few of them in zoos and aquariums, where they are no longer threatening. The ones we still have, the wild gorillas, the killer sharks, are disappearing. We live in a world where there are no giant sloths, no saber tooth tigers, no terrifying dinosaurs, no monsters left. They keep us company.If we exterminate the last magnificently scary beasts on planet Earth, as we seem bent upon doing, then no matter where we go for the rest of our history as a species - for the rest of time - we may never encounter any others.' They thrill us horribly.They allow us to recollect our limitations. As David Quammen concluded in Monster of God, 'Such creatures enliven our fondest nightmares. The Flores stork was just the latest creature to be added to the menagerie of monstrous prehistoric creatures that enthrall us. shoebill shoebillstork dinosaurbird africanshoebill whaleheadedstork Apology wrong pronunciation of Tanzania - Woops Deep in the remote, dense swamps. Imagine yourself bumping into a wild, meat eating stork that is literally twice your size. Six feet tall, extra-heavy, long and sharp beaked, no longer able to fly, this animal prowled the forest looking for meat. Second, and just recently, in this same forest, scientists discovered the bones of a never-before-seen bird. These little people - dubbed 'hobbits' - lived on this island for at least 70,000 years.

Nothing unusual here - except, very recently, modern scientists made two back-to-back discoveries about this place.įirst, it appears that the Neolithic people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores were incredibly small, the adults three feet tall, their kids about the size of owls. Deep in its tropical forests we find a small group of early humans, tool-making, cave dwelling, social people who live on fruits, fish and occasionally meat. Go back 30,000 years and picture an island somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Dinosaur shoebill stork