Millions of years ago, apex predators in the Phorusrhacidae family lived up to their more common name—terror birds. The mostly flightless, meat-eating dinosaur ...

The monstrous terror bird once roamed the earth, but it didn't manage to survive into the modern day. If it did, though, the world might look quite different.

It wasn't a dinosaur or a mammalian predator, but a colossal bird that dominated the food chain. These creatures, scientifically known as Phorusrhacidae (terror birds), were one of the m ...

Alexa Robles-Gil Alexa Robles-Gil is a bilingual science journalist based in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Undark, Inside Climate News and more.

In Colombia, a fossil-collecting rancher has found a giant, flightless killer from 13 million years ago — and a missing link to the region’s evolutionary history.

Now scientists have identified a fossil from what might be the largest terror bird ever found 1. Terror birds (Phorusrhacidae) were characterized by slender bodies and adaptations for running on ...

A gigantic new terror bird (Cariamiformes, Phorusrhacidae) from Middle Miocene tropical environments of La Venta in northern South America.

Analyzing a leg bone from a fossil site in Colombia, scientists have identified a massive “terror bird” that lived about 12 million years ago.

The field in central Colombia where the terror bird fossil was discovered nearly 20 years ago. The fossil was recently identified as a type of Phorusrhacidae, or terror bird, a meat-eating apex ...

The end of a terror bird’s left tibiotarsus, a lower leg bone in birds equivalent to that of a human tibia or shin bone, dates back to the Miocene epoch around 12 million years ago.