It¡¯s not unusual today to find swans on rivers and lakes, splitting their time between pulling up water plants and punishing the unwise with powerful blows of their bony-elbowed wings.
Eleven million years ago, however, swans in what is today called Japan did something unexpected: They took to the oceans. In a paper published this week in The Bulletin of Gunma Museum of Natural History, Japanese paleontologists formally described this family or genus of swans, Annakacygna, which had long, filter-feeding heads, small wings and seriously strange hips ¡ª all of which have led the researchers to call it the ¡°ultimate bird.¡±
The first set of remains of Annakacygna ¡ª a nearly articulated skeleton in a stone slab from a riverbed in Gunma Prefecture ¡ª were excavated by a Japanese fossil hunter in 2000. After the fossil hunter donated the remains to the Gunma Museum of Natural History, museum director Hasegawa Yoshikazu called in Hiroshige Matsuoka, a paleontologist, to examine them.
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