More than 50 million year ago, polar region Arctic was home to a giant, flightless bird, a team of researchers revealed in a new study. Researchers announced the discovery after identifying two ancient birds: Gastornis and Presbyornis. Both of them belong to extinct genus.

The new study proves that prehistoric Arctic was probably more similar to the southeastern United States than Alaska.

The team comprised researchers from the University of Colorado Boulder and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The discovery of both the birds is exciting, but Gastornis is the bigger find, as per the study published in the journal Scientific Reports.

The study is a result of just a single toe bone that belongs to Gastornis. After analyzing the bone, researchers found that the extinct genus of large flightless birds lived a long time ago on Ellesmere. The newly found bone was matching with toe bones of a Gastornis fossil skeleton discovered in Wyoming, according to the researchers.

While providing information on similarities between the newly found Gastornis bone in the Arctic and Wyoming fossil, Thomas Stidham, a professor and an author of the study, said, “I couldn’t tell the Wyoming specimens from the Ellesmere specimen even though it was found roughly 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) to the north”.

Today, Ellesmere is considered as one of the coldest places on the planet. In winters, temperatures fall to minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit. But, the bird fossils found in the Arctic suggested that a long time ago, the region was a warm, wet and home to many animal species that were different from today’s animals.

The warm weather of the region about 53 million years ago is the sole reason paleontologists see it as a fossil treasure box. Ellesmere was first noticed by paleontologists more than four decades ago. Since then, many fossils, from fish to primates, have been unearthed from the region.