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Actually, if I weren’t a stickler for only using photos and art I produced myself for my profile, I would’ve made this my banner.

One more episode of Surviving Earth airing tomorrow, so I just wanted to sum up my experience so far with the show.

www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/exhibits/blo...

Archosaur beef

Pliocene Florida, what an ecosystem. (Art by Carl Buell, species ID key screenshotted from Florida Museum of Natural History website)

He also used it to knock down Sam when he refused to give him the Allspark

Boverisuchus attempts to steal Helaletes hunted by Patriofelis

And Megatron had his flail in the first film. Too bad he never gets another one.

(This is not to say these traits evolved specifically to compensate for lacking teeth and raptorial forelimbs: they didn’t.)

They were probably faster/longer distance runner and more agile than most non-avian Mesozoic theropods for whatever that’s worth. I say that due to their leg proportions and the fact that, as birds, they’re not as long-bodied as their ancestors.

The Last Knight was a missed opportunity to show Optimus and Megatron fighting with their axe and flail, respectively. These being medieval weapons, both having an armor-like chassis, and the whole film having a medieval theme, it was the perfect time.

I still want a figure of this. I couldn’t even get the Burger King toy back then.

Could've been more ritualized and constrained, given the longer and probably less durable tusks.

a lot worse than their bite.

That's not to say they couldn't have tried to use their tusks for combat, but with how comparatively unwieldy and, more importantly, how much more fragile they likely were (elephant tusks frequently fracture in combat as is, and elephant ivory is weak under certain loads), their bark was probably--

Anancus was part of a different family, but it could have some stupidly long and/or skinny tusks. Super tuskers today seem to use their extreme tusks as an honest signal of fitness rather than as practical weapons, so I think fossil proboscideans with other extremely long tusks did the same.

Exactly what it's been compared to by the paleontologists who described it

OP picture from a larger infographic by Beth Zaiken bethzaiken.com/natural-hist...

This isn't to say keratin is COMPLETELY unable to damage bone – it can with sufficient force – but it would be more difficult. So while it's not 100% impossible we could find say, a prey item with a beak or claw puncture/scratch from a phorusrhacid, it's probably less likely.

The other reason is that terror birds had no teeth. Enamel is harder than bone, and so teeth can make marks on it relatively easily. However, keratin, which forms the outer surface of bird beaks and claws in life, is softer than bone.