What does a 500-pound canary say?

CHIRP!

If you were a peace-loving, vegetation-eating mammal living in South America between 2 and 58 million years ago, the classic old riddle would not have been very funny. That’s because Big Birds like the one pictured above were ranging the savannahs, and you can bet they were hungry. For the National Geographic series “Prehistoric Predators,” I looked into the story of the Phorusrhacid family, popularly known as Terror Birds. Here are some photos of my travels.

Star of the show: fabulous skull of the Terror Bird Kelenken Guillermoi, discovered in South America in 1999 by Guillermo Aguirrebazala, now a paleontology student at the University of La Plata, near Buenos Aires.

Re-enacting the find outside Bariloche in Patagonia. Guess who the director is?

Lake Nahuel Huapi, as seen from the from Bariloche itself. The town is a ski resort on the western edge of Patagonia in the foothills of the Andes.

Well... actually at least one Terror Bird made it across the Panama land bridge to North America. Here’s our setup in the Florida Natural History Museum where a skeleton of Titanis Walleri is displayed. Of course, it is surrounded by all kinds of other creatures, so it took some doing to isolate it for our lens.

Wireframe animation of Terror Bird on the run.

Premiere

April 28, 2009, 9 PM

The National Geographic Channel