On his expedition in Africa to find the source of the White Nile in 1840, Werne camped at Lake No, part of a 12,000-square-mile wetland called the Sudd in what is now South Sudan. European naturalists were introduced to shoebills in the 1840s.Ī German diplomat and explorer named Ferdinand Werne was the first European to hear about the shoebill. In fact, this characteristic confused taxonomists: In the past, some felt that the shoebill’s habit placed it within the family of true storks, since all true storks also use their own droppings to cool off. Shoebills practice urohydrosis, the effective-if revolting-habit of defecating on their legs to lower their body temperature. More recent studies on the shoebill's eggshell structure and DNA have supported its place among the Pelecaniformes. “There is, in fact, not the shadow of a doubt that it is either a heron or a stork but the question is, which?” zoologist Frank Evers Beddard wrote in 1905. Others countered that herons have specialized feathers than release a powdery down to help with preening, but shoebills didn’t have these feathers, so they must be storks belonging to the family Ciconiiformes. Some taxonomists said that the shoebill's syrinx, or vocal organ, resembled those of herons belonging to the family Pelecaniformes, which also includes ibises, pelicans, and boobies.

Over the past couple of centuries, naturalists have debated where shoebills should appear on the Tree of Life. Shoebills may be more closely related to pelicans than storks. Complemented by their golden eyes, the posture affects a very convincing death stare. Shoebills can stand virtually motionless for hours with their bills held down against their necks. You really can’t mistake them for any other bird: They grow 4 to 5 feet tall, have bluish-gray plumage and an 8-plus-foot wingspan, and their bill, which takes up a majority of their face, looks like a huge Dutch wooden clog. Shoebills live in the vast wetlands of the Nile watershed in eastern Africa. Shoebill storks could win staring contests. But there are a lot of misconceptions about shoebill storks-the first being that they're not actually storks. These stately wading birds stalk the marshes of South Sudan, Uganda, and elsewhere in tropical East Africa, snatching up prey with their unique, immediately recognizable bills. I'm not sure if big storks will ever thrill us the way dinosaurs do, but I imagine Steven Spielberg working on it right now, conjuring hungry-eyed storks, creeping through the underbrush, nearer and nearer to the darling baby hobbit cooing by the fire, their giant beaks dripping with fake blood.Shoebill storks have been called the world’s most terrifying bird (though the cassowary might disagree). 'Prehistory is one of the few places where we can find monsters and let our imaginations run wild.' That is why, Switek thinks, we need to go back in time to find new ones. We keep a few of them in zoos and aquariums, where they are no longer threatening. The ones we still have, the wild gorillas, the killer sharks, are disappearing. We live in a world where there are no giant sloths, no saber tooth tigers, no terrifying dinosaurs, no monsters left. They keep us company.If we exterminate the last magnificently scary beasts on planet Earth, as we seem bent upon doing, then no matter where we go for the rest of our history as a species - for the rest of time - we may never encounter any others.' They thrill us horribly.They allow us to recollect our limitations. As David Quammen concluded in Monster of God, 'Such creatures enliven our fondest nightmares. The Flores stork was just the latest creature to be added to the menagerie of monstrous prehistoric creatures that enthrall us. Imagine yourself bumping into a wild, meat eating stork that is literally twice your size.

Six feet tall, extra-heavy, long and sharp beaked, no longer able to fly, this animal prowled the forest looking for meat. Second, and just recently, in this same forest, scientists discovered the bones of a never-before-seen bird. These little people - dubbed 'hobbits' - lived on this island for at least 70,000 years. Nothing unusual here - except, very recently, modern scientists made two back-to-back discoveries about this place.įirst, it appears that the Neolithic people who lived on the Indonesian island of Flores were incredibly small, the adults three feet tall, their kids about the size of owls. Deep in its tropical forests we find a small group of early humans, tool-making, cave dwelling, social people who live on fruits, fish and occasionally meat. Go back 30,000 years and picture an island somewhere in the Indian Ocean.

Human shoebill stork size