Terror Bird!

As part of her home-schooling, I'm making the kid do a research project on biospheres.  (Science in my Fiction, among other sites, was extremely useful for this project!) We linked it with her creative writing project, which was to create five possible alien life-forms, and to describe, as if she were a xenobiologist, their habitats, ways of making a living, childcare arrangements, governing rituals, etc.

Anyway, one of her invented lifeforms, the kerata, had evolved from birds, and, alors! looked sort of like these giant terror birds I found at i09 this morning.

She was very pleased.

Although, sadly, it doesn't look like these prehistoric terror birds were intelligent.