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b"Thanks to Pranav for suggesting this week's topic, animals of the Paleogene, the period after the Cretaceous! Thanks also to Llewelly for suggesting the horned screamer, now one of my favorite birds.\\n\\nFurther watching:\\n\\nSouthern Screamers making noise\\n\\nHorned Screamers making noise\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nThe Brontotheres\\n\\nPresbyornis looked a lot like a long-legged goose [art by Smokeybjb - CC BY-SA 3.0]\\n\\n\\n\\nThe southern screamer (left) and horned screamer (right), probably the closest living relation to Presbyornis:\\n\\n \\n\\nMegacerops was really really big:\\n\\n\\n\\nAll four of these illustrated animals are actually megacerops, showing the variation across individuals of nose horn size:\\n\\n\\n\\nUintatherium had a really weird skull and big fangs:\\n\\n\\n\\nPezosiren didn't look much like its dugong and manatee descendants:\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to look at some strange animals of the Paleogene period, a suggestion from Pranav. Pranav also suggested the naked mole-rat that we talked about in episode 301, but I forgot to credit him in that one.\\nAs we talked about in episode 240, about 66 and a half million years ago, a massive asteroid smashed into the earth and caused an extinction event that ended the era of the dinosaurs. The geologic time period immediately after that event is called the Paleogene, and paleontologists study this era to learn how life rebounded after the extinction event. We\\u2019re going to learn about a few animals that evolved to fill ecological niches left vacant after dinosaurs went extinct.\\nThese days, mammals fill a whole lot of these ecological niches, so it\\u2019s easy to assume that mammals have been successful for the last 66 million years. But while that\\u2019s true now, birds were incredibly successful for a long time. Basically for millions of years after the non-avian dinosaurs died out, it was dinosaurs 2.0 as the avian dinosaurs, better known as birds, spread throughout the world and evolved into some amazing organisms.\\nThis included terror birds, which we talked about in episode 202. They lived in South America, except for one species from North America, and evolved really soon after the dinosaurs went extinct, appearing in the fossil record about 60 million years ago. They lasted a long time, too, only going extinct around 2 million years ago.\\nThe earliest known terror bird was about three feet tall, or 91 cm, but its descendants became larger and more fearsome until they were apex predators throughout South America. The biggest species grew up to ten feet tall, or three meters, with a massive beak and sharp claws on its toes. It couldn\\u2019t fly but was a fast runner. You would not want a terror bird chasing you.\\nLots of other birds evolved throughout the Paleogene, but most of them would look pretty familiar to us today. Paleontologists have found fossils of the ancestors of many modern birds, including penguins, hummingbirds, and parrots, which shows that they were already specialized some 25 or 35 million years ago or even more. In the case of penguins, we have fossils of penguin ancestors dating back to the late Cretaceous, before the extinction event. Those ancient penguins could probably still fly, but it didn\\u2019t take too long to evolve to be a fully aquatic bird. The species Waimanu manneringi lived around 62 million years ago in what is now New Zealand. It resembled a loon in a lot of ways, with its legs set well back on its body, and it probably spent much of its time floating on the water between dives. But unlike a loon, it had lost the ability to fly and its wings were already well adapted to act as flippers underwater.\\nAnother bird would have looked familiar at first glance, but really weird when you gave it a second look. Presbyornis lived between about 62 and 55 million years ago in what is now North America, and it lived in flocks around shallow lakes."