In an ancient riverbed in Bavaria, scientists have just found something almost impossible to come by: the fossilized bones of tiny birds, buried for 11.6 million years. The Hammerschmiede clay pit near the village of Pforzen in the eastern Allgäu is already famous for its treasures — including fossils of two early apes and a wealth of other animals. But birds, it turns out, are the rarest of all. Excavation leader Dr. Thomas Lechner points out that only 1 in 40 bone finds here belongs to a bird, even though birds are the most numerous group of species on Earth today.
That makes this discovery remarkable. A team led by Dr. Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum Frankfurt, Lechner, and Professor Madelaine Böhme of the University of Tübingen has described six new bird species from the site. Two of them are completely new to science. The findings were published in the Swiss Journal of Palaeontology.
The most striking newcomer is an eagle. It earned the name Mioaetus pforzenensis — the Pforzen Miocene eagle — in honor of the community and its people. Its lower-leg bone points to a wingspan of more than a meter, over three feet, and the shape of the bone suggests it likely snatched fish right out of the water with its talons, rather like a modern osprey.
The waters of the Hammerschmiede were clearly full of fish-eaters. Researchers identified a brand-new cormorant species, Bavaricarbo brevirostris — the Bavarian short-billed cormorant. It belonged to an extinct early line of cormorants and could probably fly better than today's cormorants, though it likely only dove in shallow water, like the river beside the dig. A second, still-unnamed cormorant was about the size of today's pygmy cormorant. Alongside these came a loon, known from a single wing bone, and remains of a large darter called Anhinga pannonica.
"Clearly, the rivers of the Hammerschmiede area were dominated by fish-eating diving birds," Böhme said. In fact, the number of fish-eating predators in this ancient ecosystem is far higher than in European inland waters today — evidence of remarkably complex food webs.
Not every bird hunted fish. The team also found the wing bone of a tiny swift, Apus cf. gaillardi — an insect-eater that lives its whole life on the wing. At just 9.9 millimeters long, its wing bone was far smaller than those of modern swifts. Because swifts are constantly in flight, their fossils are extraordinarily rare. This one marked the 161st vertebrate species discovered in the Hammerschmiede clay pit.
Each new bone helps scientists piece together a vanished world — a warm, watery landscape where fish-eating hunters ruled the sky and shallow rivers teemed with life. And with new digging still ahead, the seam between a modern Bavarian village and its 11-million-year-old past is only getting richer.