And God created ... every winged fowl after his kind... Genesis 1:21
"Fossils recovered from Antarctica in the 1980s represent the oldest giant members of an extinct group of birds that patrolled the southern oceans with wingspans of up to 21 feet that would dwarf the 11½-foot wingspan of today’s largest bird, the wandering 
albatross.
The fossils that the paleontologists describe are among many collected in the mid-1980s from Seymour Island, off the northernmost tip of the Antarctic Peninsula....years ago, Antarctica had a much warmer climate during the time known as the Eocene and was not the forbidding, icy continent we know today, Stidham noted. Alongside extinct land mammals, like marsupials and distant relatives of sloths and anteaters, a diversity of Antarctic birds occupied the land, sea and air."SciTech
Called pelagornithids, the birds filled a niche much like that of today’s albatrosses and traveled widely over Earth’s oceans.
“Our fossil discovery, with its estimate of a 5-to-6-meter wingspan — nearly 20 feet — shows that birds evolved to a truly gigantic size relatively quickly after the extinction of the dinosaurs and ruled over the oceans for millions of years,” said Peter Kloess, a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley.
The last known pelagornithid is from 2.5 million years ago, a time of changing climate as Earth cooled, and the ice ages began.
Kloess is the lead author of a paper describing the fossil that appears this week in the open access journal Scientific Reports.
