سؤال قراءة ستيب محلول — فهم التفاصيل (تدريب 7899)

1) Giant birds of the past have names that speak for themselves. The Elephant bird, a native of Madagascar and the largest known giant bird, stood at over nine feet tall and weighed in at 1,000 pounds or more, until it went extinct about 1,000 years ago. Australia’s Mthirung, nicknamed “Thunderbird,” which disappeared nearly 50,000 years ago, is thought to have been nearly seven feet tall and weighed between 500 and 1,000 pounds. But until now, no one had ever found evidence of these towering avians in Europe. 2) Today, researchers describe the first fossil of a giant bird found in Crimea. Dated at around 1.8 million years old, the specimen makes experts question previous assumptions that giant birds were not part of the region’s fauna during that period. 3) A team of paleontologists dug up the fossil – an unusually large femur bone – in Taurida Cave, located on the Crimean Peninsula in the northern Black Sea. The cave was only discovered last June when the construction of a new highway revealed its entrance. 4) Based on the femur’s dimensions, the team calculated that the bird would have weighed around 992 pounds as much as an adult polar bear-making it the third largest bird ever recorded. Daniel Field, a scientist at the University of Cambridge, says, “It raises exciting questions about the factors that gave rise to these giant birds, and the factors that drove them to extinction”.