Dinosaur autism, if we all pool together our love for them they may just live again - Just get on the floor, the raptor has already opened the door

In a time of giving such as this, I thought it would only be right to bring you all with new exciting content. I apologize for the wait, but I am only one person. So bear with me if my effortposts take a little while.
Today, I have decided to bring you a little list of birds. "Why", you may ask? Because fuck you, that's what I feel like doing.

Pelagornithidae
Pelagornis and other members of its family had the longest wingspans of any bird to ever live. These guys thrived in the paleocene, right after the K-Pg extinction and were the sea birds of its time, filling the niches of everything from seagulls and albatrosses before they ever evolved. One defining characteristics were the tooth-like serrations in their beaks very reminiscent of their cretaceous ancestors. They existed for a looooong time. Emercing in the early paleocene 62 million years ago and died out at only around 2.5 million years ago. During the time they still were around, many lineages came and went, boasting an incredibly long existance for any group of large animals on the fossil record. For context, our ancestors only diverged from other primates at around 6 million years ago. Showing just how long their reign truly lasted.


Terror Birds (Phorhusrhacidae)
My favorites from the list and likely familiar to some of you. The one group of theropod apex predators to evolve since the end of the cretaceous. Phorusrhacidae as they are more formally named were a group of giant flightless and predatory birds that lived in the americas. They first evolved as apex predators in south america before migrating north in the great american interchange. They were true monster, the larger specimens reaching weights of around 350 kilos and reaching over three meters tall. They were very capable predators, being able to hung everything from medium size sloths, leptopterns, tapirs, camel relatives and even horses. They were not only fast but able to keep up a fast pace for a long time, even chasing down and killing horses and prey of similar size. They competed directly with all the big ice age predator, wolves, saber-tooths, bears, you name it. They were not far behind.
I couldn't find what the true culprit of their extinction was, but there is no evidence that competition or humans did them in, so it was likely something in the environment. Their last remaining genus is Escathornis that lived in brazil at just 25 thousand years ago, but their closest living relatives are the modern day seriemas!


Teratornithidae
The single largest group of flying animals since the downfall of the pterosaurs, the teratorns were the heaviest flying birds to ever exist. They fulfilled the roles of many birds of prey, from large predators to scavengers, so it's no surprise to learn that they are closely related to new world vultures. Argentavis was the absolute largest, with a 6 meter long wingspan. Still not quite as long a wingspan as the pelagornithids from earlier, but it was way bulkier. They died out in the late pleistocene at around 12 thousand years ago.


Heracles
I love parrots, so I thought it'd be nice to shout one out. Heracles (yes, that's its name) was the single largest parrot to ever exist. It was from New Zealand much like the modern kakapo and lived in the miocene at around 16-19 million years ago. It could not fly, but it was more than capable of flying and ate many of the same things other parrots do, fruits, berries, seeds, you name it. It weighed around 7 kilos. It is unfortunate that it went extinct, but if it's any consolation, it did so way before humans ever evolved so we have no blame in this case.


Giant prehistoric penguins
We (yes, we) all love penguins, and there would be too many giant ones to list off so I'll just group them up in one entry. Most of them were from lineages way older than modern penguins and they lived on coasts all over the globe, from new zealand, antarctica, south america and australia, they were everywhere. There isn't much to talk about here, they were penguins, just the size of a person.



Elephant Bird and Moa
Two giant ratites, one from madagascar and one from new zealand, both were hunted into extinction by human settlers


Dodo
These dove cousins had no natural predators. They had no fear of humans and casually approached us when we met, and so our ancestors also hunted them to extinction. They were too pure for this world.



Kauai Oo
And this is the bird with the single, saddest backstory we still have the recording of. They were the last remnants of their family, and with they, died an entire lineage. A tragic loss for our biodiversity.

There used to be giant octopuses that lived alongside the dinosaurs that could predate on anything from shelled prey to sharks, plesiosaurs and mosasaurs. Meet Nanaimoteuthis, the real life kraken!


And in a funny twist of convergent evolution, predatory cephalodops used to be armored at around the same time armored fish swam through the oceans, and around the same time they also ditched their armor for more sleek streamlined bodies:


They belong to the suborder cirrata which makes them very closely related to the dumbo octopus. And in turn displayed a very high intelligence that is displayed not only by their ancestry, but by the wear patterns on their beaks which show that they preferred to use one side of their beaks to chew over the others, evidence of lateralization which is a common pattern observed on smart animals. Not only does it show that octopuses could get big, but even back then they were just as smart as they are today!