The Hammerschmiede clay pit yielded a short-beaked cormorant and a new Miocene raptor
Early late Miocene beds at the Hammerschmiede clay pit in southern Germany yielded the stem-group cormorant Bavaricarbo brevirostris and the raptor Mioaetus pforzenensis. The University of Tübingen and the Senckenberg institute in Frankfurt described six bird species more than 11 million years old from the pit near Pforzen, two of them new genera and species. The site has now returned 161 species and 50,000 fossils.
Science··Evening
A new cormorant and a raptor from a tarsometatarsus
In volume 145 of the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology, Gerald Mayr, Thomas Lechner and Madelaine Böhme named Bavaricarbo brevirostris, a stem-group cormorant from Hammerschmiede clay, and Mioaetus pforzenensis, an accipitrid raptor from a fragment of ankle bone. The same heap also holds a second, still unnamed cormorant the size of living Microcarbo. There is the first partial ankle bone of the darter Anhinga pannonica, an upper-arm bone of a loon whose species is open, and a swift bone linked with caution to Apus gaillardi.[1]
Pforzen's name went onto the new raptor
The University of Tübingen and Frankfurt's Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum announced bird bones older than 11 million years from the pit next to Pforzen in the Ostallgäu. Six species sit on the cormorant, loon and eagle lines; two are new genera and species. The new raptor received the name Pforzen Miocene eagle; its span is thought to have exceeded one metre, and it is thought to have taken fish. The Bavarian short-beaked cormorant looks built for shallow water. The pit has given 161 species and 50,000 fossils.[2]
Fish-eating birds in the same river system
Two cormorants, one darter and one loon sit in the same heap; the paper reads that as a rich river layout that fed fish-eating birds. The new cormorant and the raptor that carries Pforzen's name are linked to shallow water and to taking fish. Europe's slice of the Miocene had given up few bird bones; Hammerschmiede is still turning out taxa unseen at other pits.[1], [2]
