First proper Dromornis stirtoni reconstruction

I went hunting around on the internet for some good pictures of Dromornis stirtoni skeletons and I came across a website of Gondwana Studios, a company that produces museum quality casts of fossils. I first heard of them from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery when I went asking about palaeontology back when I was in college. Must have been in 2004, when they had a dinosaur exhibition up. I was sketching their Gallimimus bullatus and their Tarbosaurus bataar skeletons. I would show them to you but the graphite has all smudged and it looks terrible. You are see their wares at www.gondwanastudios.com. It seems that the produce cats of a Dromornis skeleton or the related Bullockornis. This I sketched and layered muscle, skin and feather on it. I think that it may have had a naked head at least if it was a habitual consumer of flesh because it would save feathers from being soiled by gore. Arguements against Dromornis being a carnivore is the absence of a hook on the beak and long recurved claws on the toes, there being hoof-like strutures instead.

Personally, I think that it may have at least been omnivorous and maybe had a ecological niche like a bear (Ursidae). The beak of a bird as a keratin sheath to it. Keratin is the same protein that constitutes your fingernails, hair and the horn sheaths of cattle. The toucan is a bird with a massive beak as well and it does eat mainly fruit. However it does eat eggs and chicks of other birds as well as the occasional lizard. It does not have a pronounced hook on its bill but it does have a few tooth-like projections that point towards the back of the mouth. This would help it hook food into its mouth. These serrations are not present in the bone but only in the keratin sheath. I don't think it inconceivable that Dromonis had some comparable structure. Since the beak is very deep, it may have been also used for some sort of display struture as in a toucan and I have added stripes to it to break up its outline.

I'm thinking of putting wattles on this animal's throat, so I am looking at the wattles I can see in extant birds. I think they should be at the base of the neck, unlike how I have placed them here, so they don't get covered in blood and gore when it feeds. If this was indeed a predatory bird, I believe that display may have been important to it because the damage these animals could do to each other could be potentially fatal. They might have had mechanisms to intimidate an opponent to avoid such injurious conflicts.