Great Blue Windrunner

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The Great Blue Windrunner is a huge fictional bird, with a wingspan of over 50 feet wide, making it larger than the largest flying bird to have ever lived (Argentavis magnificens). It was invented for the film The Future is Wild. This bird inhabits the mountainous Great Plateau 100 million years from now. Its ancestors are cranes. The Great Plateau is much higher than the Tibetan Plateau, so the great blue windrunner has to specialize to cope with the thin air. Birds are able to reach high altitudes but the thin air cannot hold up wings as well as the air near the ground, and the great blue windrunner must be adaptable to spend its winter in the lowlands. To solve its problem, the great blue windrunner evolved flight feathers on its legs, so it can use them as extra pair of wings for gliding by spreading them sideways in mid flight. Its head also has feathery tufts which act as gliding wings to support its head in flight. At such high altitude, ultraviolet light leaks through the atmosphere. The great blue windrunner is covered in fluorescent blue feathers that reflect ultraviolet light - but it does not end there. Great blue windrunners can see in ultraviolet and use the light to recognize one another. Also, their eyes are protected from these high amounts of light by "built-in-sunglasses" The great blue windrunners eat silver spiders.