Creature Feature: Trilobites- K. brutoni.

Of all things this blog has covered, trilobites have not been among them. We've done Anomalocaris, triops, and various other prehistoric shelled things, but never the classic trilobite. So, for the sake of a trilobite finally having its day in the sun, here:

Cambrian (early) trilobite.

For starters: what is a trilobite, anyways? Trilobites were a huge group of extinct arthropods. They came about before the Cambrian Explosion and lasted until the Permian Extimction (252.28 Ma). They took over the world, or at least the seas, during much of their time on earth; if a landmass was underwater up to the Permian, it'll have trilobites somewhere. We are still not sure whether these bizarre creatures were more closely related to crustaceans or arachnids. This is after finding millions of trilobite specimens. Just treat them as their own thing, for now.

Trilobites are by no means rare. There were millions of them in the prehistoric seas. They had four distinct orders and several hundred genera. It is possible to tell where a fossil formation is from just by looking at the trilobites. They came in all sorts of shapes and sizes, so they were able to fit a million different niches. Now, they're so common in fossil collections that rock shops sometimes sell them for cheap. By fossil standards, anyways.

The kicker is that there were so many different trilobites that I would feel guilty compressing them all into one entry. That said, I picked what I thought was the most...shocking...out of the trilobite species: Koneprusia brutoni. 

This is the TOP of the trilobite. (Credit: Wikimedia.)

K. brutoni was one of the most elaborately-decorated trilobites in existence. It lived during the Devonian in what is now Morocco. Its genus was a member of the order Lichida, which is notorious for spiny trilobites. These spines may have evolved to coincide with the advent of jawed fishes, but nobody really knows. Alas, despite its awesome looks, information on K. brutoni is very, very sparse.




This trilobite just looks badass. You could slap this thing on a heavy metal album cover and it would sell for the sheer WTF. It's one of those trilobites that has spines all over and generally looks like something from Alien. Regrettably, there have been no horror movies about giant trilobites...fund it. We need to break the alien/zombie fad going on.

From here. The price is exceptional for this excellent specimen.

So, what happened to all the trilobites, including K. brutoni? They slowly lost their ecological niches as time went on. Some people think that the last remnants might be horseshoe crabs and certain types of abyssal shrimp. Now trilobites are remembered as the generic "prehistoric bug...." and Kabutops, who remembers that trilobites were once badass.

I'll make YOU extinct!

Creature Feature: Diplocaulus.

"Dinosaur" has been somewhat of a "generic extinct animal" category since I was in preschool. Packages containing dinosaurs have also contained cavemen, mammoths, and saber-toothed tigers. We can forgive Dimetrodon; at least it looks kind of like Spinosaurus. Then we have this: \



This strange, boomerang-headed creature is called Diplocaulus. This thing was around in the Permian, which means that, like Dimetrodon, it was properly around before the dinosaurs. It was a giant, meter-long amphibian similar to a salamander- not a lizard at all! Most Diplocaulus fossils have been found inthe good ol' U.S. of A., particularly Texas. It probably ate insects, but we don't have a time machine to prove it.


Diplocaulus has remained a mainstay of "here, have some random prehistoric stuff" packages for one simple reason: That head. Diplocaulus had a distinctive, arrow-shaped skull. Possible reasons for this skull include burrowing, making it hard to swallow, and a hydrodynamic feature. Some museums draw Diplocaulus with a flap of skin running from its arrowhead to its tail, allowing it to undulate through its watery domain. Nobody really knows what Diplocaulus's head was for, but it's marketable as hell.

Now in origami for your enjoyment.

Alas, if you want a Diplocaulus or something similar as a pet, I cannot help you. The Diplocaulus has no living relatives.  Nothing has evolved a head quite like Diplocaulus, which adds more mystery to the beast. It's still sad that no lizard has evolved headgear this cool.

Next time you find a random box of "dinosaurs," take a good look. Dimetrodon should not be there. Wooly mammoths should not be there. Technically, pterodactyls shouldn't be there (they're pterosaurs, not dinosaurs). Diplocaudus definitely shouldn't be there, even if it does look neat. Now you know what it's called and can brag about it to fellow nerds. :)

Creature Feature: Diictodon.

Sometimes I laugh at Bulbapedia. The people there must only look at names once before adding origin trivia to an entry. A royal/ball python looks nothing like Serperior, even though it has "royal" in the name. I admit that finding what was most likely the true basis for that Pokemon took time, but man oh man, is the knowledge of the general public limited if they take Bulbapedia as god.

(For those of you who are curious, look up a snake called "Baron's Racer." The only reason I know that snake exists is because I found it on kingsnake.com. There's also probably some vine snake in there, but hi, Snivy line!)

That's part of the reason I made this blog: Maybe this is a tiny bit of an overstatement, but in general, it does not look like people are curious enough to look up things for themselves. I could spend hours just Googling things that are mildly intriguing, then making them into blog entries for the general public to enjoy.

For this entry, let us look at one of the oldest entries in the Pokedex: Nidorino (magenta, male)/Nidorina (blue, female). They are both plain Poison-Types and were the first Pokemon to sport biological sex and gender. (Yes, those two terms are VERY different according to the scientific community.) Most people would be in general agreement that the two Nidoran base forms resemble rodents with extra spikes, but look closely at Nidorina in particular. No extant mammal has a body structure quite like that. Those pointy teeth don't look too rodent-y, either.

Know what, though? An extinct proto-mammal did. Ken Sugimori did not pull Nidorina's design out of nowhere; before the dinosaurs existed, there was a creature called a Diictodon.

Mwahaha!

Diictodon (a genus, mind) were among the many synapsids (mammal-like reptiles) that lived during the Late Permian (255 million years ago). They had small, tusklike teeth and beaky skulls. So that those of you who only know dinosaurs do not get confused, this was before the Triassic Period, the first period to feature small dinosaurs. Fossils of these not-mammals are found in Asia and Africa, with the great majority of South African fossils being Diictodon. Like the Nidoran line, however, they were only distantly related to mammals when all was said and done.

 

Diictodon were small, burrowing mammals that would not have stood knee-high to a human. They had short, stocky limbs with five fingers on each hand.  Insofar as fossil records can tell us, they were social animals, but not colonial like prairie dogs. (A few Pokedex entries also mention Nidorina burrowing.) They probably lived, ate, and burrowed like gophers.




Besides the obvious Pokemon analog, Diictodon have had a small presence in popular culture. They were featured in Walking With Monsters as well as Primeval. In Primeval, they were chewing up electrical cables inside a hospital, and the crew managed to send all but two of them back to their own time. The remaining two were kept as pets along with the show's other mascot character, Rex. They were first described as "beaver-things," which makes me wonder why no one has yet to update Bulbapedia with their presence. Really, it's been over ten years since Red and Green and we still haven't realized that the Nido family is full of synapsids?

Creature Feature: Gorgonopsids.

Oh, furries. Why is it that your fursonas, despite being so "varied," tend to loop back to felids, canids, raptors and dragons? If you really want to be intimidating and predatory, go for something so weird, yet close enough to a modern carnivore that it creates an 'Uncanny Valley' effect.

Uncanny Valley'd!

Like this thing. What the hell is this thing?

That menacing-looking beast is a gorgonopsid (family Gorgonopsidae). Like Dimetrodon, it was not a dinosaur, but a mammal-like reptile called a synapsid. Synapsids were the way, way ancient ancestors of every mammal known today. Gorgonopsids were one family of many mammal-like reptiles present throughout ancient history. Every single one of them looked like something out of a horror flick.

Even though the name "gorgonopsid" literally means "gorgon-eyed," with jaws like that, who cares about the eyes? Gorgons also had huge tusks (which is not usually acknowledged in most modern media); gorgonopsids have saber-teeth and long, sturdy jaws to work with them. Their sizes ranged from being dog-sized carnivores to bear-sized behemoths (e.g. Inostrancevia); regardless of how big they were, those jaws would have torn a nice chunk out of their prey. As stated in my Dimetrodon entry, differentiated teeth like this are usually a sign that a given skull is at least a proto-mammal.

Gorgonopsids were wiped out in the Permian-Triassic extinction. In case you do not know your history of the world, the Triassic period was the first chunk of the Mesozoic, featuring relatively small dinosaurs. Gorgonopsids went extinct before that; despite being in the 'prehistoric animal' category, they never met a dinosaur. These creatures never got to compete with the big dinosaurs that most people know and love (or even the little ones). 



Synapsids are often overlooked in the modern media, but gorgonopsids got a fair amount of screentime on the British television show Primeval. It looks like a neat show, to say the least. Past and future superpredators entering the present day and causing damage? Count us in.

One of these. Black with bright purple stripes. Nobody knows what skin covering this creature had, so feel free to go nuts with fur, skin, and scales. GOGOGO, furry community!

Next time: A bat? Sure. Why not?