The show is part of The Discovery Channel’s Mega Beasts series and will broadcast at 9 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 13 and again at midnight Monday, Sept. 14.

The Discovery Channel’s billing describes the Terror Bird as “The biggest, baddest bird to ever stalk the planet. With its massive 18-inch beak, Terror Bird bashed its victims' brains in and swallowed giant rodents in one gulp. Four million years ago it dominated a continent, battling wolves and sabertooth cats.”

“Terror birds were an extra-ordinary group of predatory birds and important members of the Great American Biotic Interchange,” Chandler said. “Terror birds competed with all the top mammalian predators except man.”

A filming crew transformed the Georgia College Natural History Museum into a movie set in November 2008 to film Chandler and Georgia College Biological and Environmental Sciences Chair Dr. Bill Wall for the special.

Chandler and Wall, who have coauthored papers and worked together for 12 years, talked specifically during the filming about the Terror Birds’ anatomy and biomechanics — how the birds were hard-wired and how their internal anatomy functioned.

“I have applied the laws of physics to study what the Terror Birds could do and could not have done,” Wall said.

Chandler has studied Terror birds for 20 years, dredging for fossils in the Santa Fe River in north central Florida and doing field work in Argentina. Georgia College students and volunteers have joined Chandler during the past 10-plus years excavating fossils from the river.

“Now we’re able to CAT scan the skulls to determine their internal structure and the mechanics of how they functioned and how they interacted with other predators and their prey,” Chandler said.

The Terror Bird, standing 6.5 feet tall and weighing 250-300 pounds was the largest predatory bird that ever lived. They were raptors preying on hoofed animals similar to deer and ancestral beaver four times larger than their modern-day cousins.

“They pursued, ambushed, and killed with a lethal bite,” Chandler said.