Paleontologists have discovered in Australia the remains of fossil eagles that were large enough to carry large prey. It's possible they could carry a hobbit like in John Ronald Reuel Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Live Science reports..

As the newspaper notes, the real giants were not as big as their invented " Wizards definitely couldn't fly on them.. But they were big enough to carry hobbit-sized prey in their claws..

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The new species, named the mighty Gaff's Eagle (Dynatoaetus gaffae), was described from a collection of fossils collected between 1959 and 2021 in a 17-meter-deep vertical cave in New Australia..

Bones, including wings, legs, claws, sternum and skull, show that the giant bird probably had claws about 30 centimeters long and a wingspan of about three meters.. This makes it the largest bird of prey found in Australia to date..

According to Trevor Worthy, a vertebrate paleontologist at Flinders University in Australia, the bird lived between 50,000 and 700,000 years ago.. She was probably the largest eagle that lived on the planet at that time..

During the life of the eagle, other giant animals lived in Australia, including large flightless birds, giant kangaroos and monitor lizards, as well as bear-like marsupials.. Probably, the bird preyed on the young of these species, as well as their weak and small representatives.. In addition, the eagle could hunt kangaroos, which could reach 1.3 meters tall.. According to The Lord of the Rings, the hobbit was 0.9-1.2 meters tall.

Despite its extraordinary size, D. gaffae was nowhere near as big as the giant eagles in The Lord of the Rings, which in Peter Jackson's films had wingspans of up to 23 meters.. However, D. gaffae was more than twice the size of the Australian wedge-tailed eagle that lives on the planet today and probably coexisted with D. gaffae before the larger species of eagles went extinct.