Bruce Museum science director investigates largest bird ever

Daniel Ksepka with the Pelagornis sandersi skull he studied in South Carolina. Photo provided by the Bruce Museum

About 25 million years ago, an enormous bird flew over what is now South Carolina. It died near what would become the site of Charleston International Airport. An airport expansion in 1983 uncovered it, and a 2014 scientific publication links it to Greenwich.

With a wingspan beyond 20 feet, Pelagornis sandersi is the largest bird yet discovered, double the size of the largest albatrosses flying today.

For all time, the ancient bird will be linked with the new curator of science at Greenwich”™s Bruce Museum, Daniel Ksepka, who studied and wrote about the fossil. He took the post in June and gave a lecture on Pelagornis sandersi at the Bruce on Sept. 9.

Ksepka was studying fossilized remains in South Carolina in 2012 when he was shown a fossilized bird found near the Charleston airport.

Ksepka, who holds a doctorate in earth and environmental sciences from Columbia University, declined to say he had discovered the bird. “I went there to study birds. The curator unveiled it; it was not tucked away forgotten.

“It”™s a remarkable, bony-toothed bird,” he said in a phone interview before the lecture. “It was instantly clear this was a different species. The main bone of the wing was far larger than my entire arm.”

Pelagornis sandersi as it might have looked. Image provided by the Bruce Museum

But suspicion of a new species in paleontology only begins a quest. “Finding if it was a new species required a lot of work,” he said. “Some species are based on a single bone. There”™s a lot of ruling out to do.”

In July, his findings were published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, creating headlines around the world. The bird was likely a formidable glider but awkward on land.

The species is named for Albert Sanders, a former museum curator in South Carolina who helped to excavate the fossil.

With a wingspan of 20 to 24 feet, Pelagornis sandersi was more than twice as big as the royal albatross, the largest living flying bird, according to the Bruce.

The giant birds lived all over the globe for tens of millions of years but vanished during the Pliocene Epoch, 3 million years ago, for unknown reasons. The fossil Ksepka studied is now in the collections at the Charleston Museum.

“Pelagornithids were like creatures out of a fantasy novel ”” there is simply nothing like them around today,” Ksepka said.