The terror birds die out
After 50 million years as apex predators, South America's giant flightless hunters disappear.
- When
- Known to
- ± 200 thousand years
- Era
- Early Pleistocene, Quaternary
The phorusrhacids decline sharply after the Great American Biotic Interchange and the last of them, including Titanis in North America, are gone by around 1.8 million years ago. Competition from placental carnivores arriving from the north is the traditional explanation, though climate change and the spread of drier open habitats also feature. Their disappearance closes one of the longest runs of any predatory lineage in the Cenozoic.