Palaeobiology - Tumblr Posts
ah yes. some of us in the palaeontological enthusiast community refer to these bad dudes collectively as The Dunk Of The Devonian. because we can.
what was the name of the fish my geology teacher called “bad dude” because i put bad dude in my notes and have no idea what the real name is
silurian placoderms: so uh…what’s with the weird fin bones?
silurian lobe finned fishes:
the phrase “geologic snapshot of the apocalypse” might be the most metal thing I’ve ever heard said in the context of paleontology, and the scariest part is how accurate that is.
hey, @bunjywunjy - this might be your jam (and any other dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s a heck of a read)
Island Weirdness #46 — Tyto pollens
The islands of the Caribbean looked very different during the Pleistocene ice ages, when changing sea levels meant larger areas of land were exposed — and one of the most extreme examples of this was the Bahamas, much larger than they are today, with most of the Bahaman Banks exposed and over 10 times more land area.
Tyto pollens was an enormous barn owl, around 1m tall (3'3"), the size of a large eagle and one of the biggest owls to ever exist. It lived in old-growth pine forests on what is now the Andros Island archipelago and preyed mostly on Bahamian hutias, which were originally the only terrestrial mammals in the Bahamas.
It probably evolved in Cuba, and colonized the Bahamas shortly after the hutias did, sometime in the last 400,000 years during a glacial period when a particularly low seal level meant the islands were only about 30km apart.
It was the main nocturnal predator in the Bahamas, and much like its older Italian relative Tyto gigantea it also had a giant hawk counterpart in the daytime: the huge Titanohierax.
Although many popular online sources refer to Tyto pollens as being flightless, it actually had large robust wings and could probably fly quite well. This might be due to some confusion between it and a completely different giant Caribbean owl, Ornimegalonyx.
The Lucayan people probably reached Andros Island sometime around 1000 CE, and coexisted with the giant owls for several centuries. It was only after European arrival in the 1500s and the felling of their forest habitat that they seem to have vanished.
Local legends of an owl-like creature called the chickcharney may have been inspired by historical encounters with Tyto pollens, and suggest that they were aggressively territorial.
If giraffes were predators they would look both hilarious and terrifying while sneaking up on their prey
who was the first animal to fuck instead of budding or something.. he mustve been like mm.. oo damn girl this feels good LOL
it’s him.... the Vorax......
After an otherwise uneventful afternoon Galagadon is finding itself caught between the claws of Didelphodon and the determined eyes of Acheroraptor
hi! astrobiologist with a longtime special interest in palaeo-science, here with a fun fact: she’s not far off the mark!
there’s a reasonably plausible hypothesis that describes how chunks of Earth ejected during the Chicxulub impact at the end of the Cretaceous would have more than matched escape velocity for the Earth-Moon system and been flung out into the greater solar system, potentially colliding with other bodies like Mars or the Galilean Moons! If these objects were carrying life on them, likely highly durable bacteria or microbial life (*coughs* TARDIGRADES), they could actually have seeded other worlds in the system with terrestrial life!
so in short, the dino-killer space rock may have actually yeeted water bears to Europa! we won’t know for sure til we explore the icy moons of Jupiter, but the possibility is there!
I went to high school with a girl who said we should check the other planets for the dinasours because when the meteor hit they probably got catapulted away :(
and how can you be sure she’s wrong
Helicoprion: What if, like, teeth,
Mesosaurus: Yeah?
Helicoprion: but WHEEL
Mesosaurus: No don’t -
Helicoprion:
(Image by ДиБгд)
reach WITHIN to your LOCAL polar ice cap and you will find a Friend And Boy
Antarctica was not always a frozen rock at the bottom of the world. In April 2020, analysis of a 100-foot-deep sediment core from the Antarctic ocean floor revealed the presence of ancient pollen, roots and other tell-tale signs of a rainforest that thrived there some 90 million years ago. Now, paleontologists have uncovered an even more recent sign of the frigid continent’s balmy past: a fossilized frog dating to roughly 40 million years ago, reports Maria Temming for Science News.
This fossil frog is the first ever discovered in Antarctica, according to the new research published in the journal Scientific Reports. Prior digs have unearthed the remains of less familiar-looking bygone amphibians, but none with such a direct evolutionary through-line to creatures that walk—or hop— the Earth today.
The ancient frog’s anatomy bears a close resemblance to a living family of frogs called helmeted frogs (Calyptocephalellidae) which inhabit damp, temperate forests in Chile.
“They looked like today’s frogs. No different. Our frog was rather small but this is in the range of the living ones, although most of the living ones are bigger,” Thomas Mörs, study co-author and a paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, tells Katie Hunt of CNN.
During the life of this frog, Antarctica was replete with water lilies, mammals and even leeches—all of which have also been discovered on Seymour Island, the area that produced the frog fossil, Mörs tells CNN.
A Helmeted Water Frog, Calyptocephalella gayi, by Wikipedia Commons
I’m sorry,
they
what?
Trilobites were Leg Breathers, New Research Shows
http://www.sci-news.com/paleontology/trilobites-leg-breathers-09518.html
If there’s any equivalent to carcinization in mammals, it’s turning into an otter-beaver-like semi-aquatic form.
Because it just keeps happening.
Modern examples alone include otters, beavers, muskrats, giant otter shrews, desmans, aquatic genets, yapoks, lutrine opossums, and platypuses – and in the fossil record there were early pinnipeds, remingtonocetids, pantolestids, stagodontids, and Liaoconodon going as far back as the early Cretaceous. Even outside of the true mammals there were also Castorocauda, Haldanodon, and Kayentatherium during the Jurassic, and much further back in the late Permian there was the early cynodont Procynosuchus.
So a non-cynodont synapsid doing the exact same thing really isn’t all that surprising.
Perplexisaurus foveatus was a member of the therocephalians, a group of synapsids that were close evolutionary “cousins” of the cynodonts-and-true-mammals lineage. Similar in size to a modern rat, about 20cm long (8"), it lived in Western Russia during the Late Permian about 268-265 million years ago.
At the time this region was a river plain with a tropical climate, experiencing seasonal floods that turned the whole area into what’s known as “viesses” (a name based on the abbreviation “V.S.S.” standing for “very shallow sea”), vast shallow lake-seas that persisted for weeks or months at a time.
So this little animal has been interpreted as being semi-aquatic, swimming around and feeding on aquatic invertebrates and tiny fish and amphibians. Its skull had numerous pits around the front of its face, suggesting that it had a highly sensitive snout – probably whiskery, allowing it to hunt entirely by touch in dark murky water, but it’s also been proposed to have possibly had an electroreceptive sense similar to modern platypuses.
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This is a free coupon/excuse for you to infodump on the current topic you’re obsessed with. Take some time away from internet discourse and share with us something you find interesting.
Today I read about Precambrian animals!
The above one is Thectardis, which is an animal so weird we have almost no inclination of how to categorize it. We know it was alive and it was cone shaped. That’s it.
The thing about fossil life from 500+ million years ago is that there often aren’t really any living analogs for it? Many of the animals from that time were sessile, many filter feeders, without much in common with what comes to mind when we think “Animal”—something that moves around and has a brain and thinks. The strata that preserve these animals are very rarely accessible, and these glimpses we have are hard to interpret.
Many of these creatures are known from a single fossil. Many are too weird to interpret or classify even tentatively.
Here’s another organism from that time, Eoandromeda:
Look at this thing. I can’t explain why, but Eoandromeda makes me feel some kind of deep dread. Like...we don’t know what this thing was. We don’t even know if it was an animal. I look at that shape and I want someone to tell me what that thing is. But we don’t know. We don’t have the words for What That Thing Is.
Imagine something so alien, so divergent from the paths life took to the present day, that we can’t look at it and say “That’s a worm” or “That’s a sponge” or “that’s a jellyfish” or...anything. The words for it literally don’t exist, because nothing like it now exists, and we know nothing about it. We’re not looking at different versions of the same categories of creature we have now. We’re looking at something that is too obscure to have a category. We can guess what it might have looked like. But it is so utterly unlike anything that exists now that we know nothing—except that undeniably, it existed.
Namacalathus. Be honest, doesn’t this make you scream inside? Or is it just me? This was a real animal that existed. It doesn’t know or give a fuck what a “snail” or “bird” is.
Learning about dinosaurs is DIFFERENT. We know what bones are. We have them! When we say that sauropod dinosaurs ate plants, we can imagine those plants. We can describe dinosaurs as having a “neck” and “claws” and “legs.” And I think that’s comforting because whatever I feel when I look at Namacalathus is not that.
This one invented muscles! Muscles are okay! I have muscles! That should make me feel better, right!
...Not really! Put it back!
For millions of years these things existed, living their unknowable lives. There was an entire world of these organisms. This was EARTH, our world.
People mostly haven’t heard of these. I think people care less about these strange early creatures because they seem less charismatic, not having brains or doing anything, but I think there is a lot of charisma to the Unknowable Cone Animal, the Dread Spiral, and all the other unsettling animals of the Precambrian.
I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.
If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.
If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we'd never come up with those ears.
If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn't know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.
We wouldn't know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.
My point here is that we don't know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they'd been all around us the whole time.
it’s a beautiful day in Neosaur Park, and you are a horrible Struthiomimus.
Tyrannosaurus was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Having imprinted on its handler since infancy, the creature maintained a docile temperament all the way to adulthood, and indeed seemed to prefer feeding from its designated trough to pursuing prey. Its interactions with staff and guests showed at most a mild curiosity, and the only real terror the beast inspired was when it snuck up on trainers to sniff their hats.
The raptors were not the most dangerous animals in the park. Hollywood had greatly exaggerated their size, first of all, and while they had a mischievous streak (one individual in particular was fond of stealin zookeepers’ wallets), they were far from the hyper-intelligent murder lizards everyone expected. Their intelligence was less of the predatory sort and more the comical intelligence of a corvid, devoted mostly to play and caring for their fellow flock members.
The mosasaur was not the most dangerous animal in the park. Though it held no loyalty to the zookeepers, it had taken to training well enough, and would dutifully move to a specific section of the tank when signaled, giving the keepers space to carry out any business they needed to accomplish in its tank without fear of harm.
No, by far the most dangerous animal in the park was the Struthiomimus. Everyone expected it to be easy - what were these animals in pop culture beyond being fodder for the carnivores? Surely the bird-mimics couldn’t be much of a hassle. Sadly, they weren’t just any bird mimics.
No, in temperament, the Struthiomimus mimicked a swan.
Highly territorial and vicious to the bone, more keepers had suffering brutal beatings by the struthis than had been hurt by the rest of the park’s fauna combined. And when they learned to chew through the fences…
Well, let’s just say the Tyrannosaurus never experienced a more terrifying day in her life.
"how could he have done better?" he is doing his FUCKING BEST, David!
please watch this i love him
Just adding to the point that we don't have much fossil evidence of polar pterosaurs- there are two big problems that exacerbate each other as to why we don't have much polar pterosaur material. #1 is that pterosaurs didn't fossilize very well. Their bone structure was so amazingly light that their bodies were usually destroyed by indelicate scavengers and general terrestrial weathering after death, where hardier-boned animals wouldn't be as damaged. Most of the well documented pterosaur fossils are from seabed deposits, where the scavengers and weathering would have been much gentler overall and the silt was fine enough to preserve their fragile structures. Problem #2 is the fact that polar environments aren't usually very conducive to fossilization. Food is scarce in the tundras and boreal forests, and any dead pterosaurs would almost certainly have been torn apart by starving scavengers before getting the chance to fossilize. Even if the conditions were ripe for fossilization -a nice silty springtime floodplain, or an icy bog full of tannins- there's a lot of harsh weathering that goes on in the Arctic and Antarctic due to the climate, and fossils don't last very long in conditions like that. Overall, it's just very unfortunate that these animals were mostly unpreserved due to harsh conditions, because in all likelihood they represented some fascinating evolutionary extremes.
Could pterosaurs tolerate cold climates? It's kind of noteworthy how "Ice Worlds" was the only episode without pterosaurs.
Yep, pterosaurs probably would have been fine in the cold! They were active, warm blooded animals with an insulating feathery coat and would have been well protected in colder regions. We actually have some fossil evidence of a pterosaur in Denali National Park in Alaska, in the form of a handprint! I believe this is the most northern example of pterosaur presence but if anyone knows differently do tell!
There are also pterosaur fossils that have been found in Antarctica, and while it wasn't perpetually frozen like today temperatures were still low and most of the continent probably experienced seasonal freezing as shown in Prehistoric Planet. So evidently, pterosaurs were able to put up with that too!
So why aren't there pterosaurs in the Ice Worlds episode? Probably because in most of the locations featured, we don't have pterosaur fossils. It's not enough to say that there definitely weren't pterosaurs there, but the focus was on animals that we know were present in the area.
Chilesaurus... 2!
Oh by the way have you seen the new dinosaur? It’s a bipedal basal thyreophoran from the Late Cretaceous
Ahh yep, the Tanis site! I remember when this article first came out years ago; I reblogged it at the time in fact! DePalma may have fucked up a bit with the turtle thing but he's legit. Geologic snapshot of the apocalypse, indeed.
hey, @bunjywunjy - this might be your jam (and any other dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s a heck of a read)