Creature Feature: Amargasaurus

Despite the strange subconscious connection between dragons and snakes, there is a very strong idea that dragons were either the last few remaining dinosaurs or based off of dinosaur bones. It's a valid theory to explain where the idea of dragons (and gryphons!) came from, even if snakes share a loooot of symbolism in the collective subconscious as guardian serpents. After all, who's to say that some dinosaurs didn't survive into medieval times? Then, well, humans were dicks and killed off the dinosaurs that weren't from the Congo. We're probably the meanest species ever, and wasps that lay eggs in caterpillars are a thing.

Anyways, dragons.

This is an Amargasaurus. It was found in La Amarga Arroyo, Argentina. The name simply refers to the area in which it was found. Like all sauropods, it was an herbivore, and lived in the Cretaceous Period with 95% of the other popular dinosaurs. It was relatively small, being only 30 feet (~10 meters) long. Yes, "as long as a school bus" is indeed small by sauropod standards.

Amargasaurus is probably the dinosaur that looks the most like a dragon. The long neck. The spikes. Since this is a sauropod we're talking about, it might even have given rise to lake/river monsters with only the head and tail visible beneath the water. It would indeed have looked like a bizarre giant snake. If there is any dinosaur that screams "dragon," it's Amargasaurus.

Disclaimer: May not be correct.

As of this entry, Amargasaurus is the only sauropod to ever flaunt spikes. Nobody knows what these neck and back spikes were for. A while back, it was popular to depict Amargasaurus with a sail spanning those spikes; this has since gone out of fashion, making it the most boss-looking longneck ever instead. Other theories include a mating display and, well, defense. Spikes are quite the fitting way to protect the most vulnerable part on a sauropod's body, no?

Despite looking a loooot like a Western dragon without the wings, Amargasaurus hasn't had very much screentime. Sure, it pops up in Fossil Fighters and Jurassic Park games, but that's about it. It suffers from the same syndrome all duckbills that aren't Parasaurolophus and all pterosaurs that aren't Pteranodon do: it doesn't fit the "modern analogy" mold and doesn't look a damn thing like the Apatosaurus or Brachiosaurus, AKA the "default" sauropods. It's also not as big as either of those two sauropods, making it possibly the most underrated sauropod ever. Try calling it a dragon; people will totally buy it.

Pterosaur Week: Quetzalcoatlus.

Sometimes, one wonders why certain dinosaurs get popular and others remain obscure. Tyrannosaurus rex was not the largest carnivorous dinosaur, for example. Pterosaurs also have an excellent example of this in Pteranodon, which was not the largest and not even the most dragonlike of the pterosaurs. It's a fairly simple bat-lizard-bird creature; just about the only outstanding thing outside from the very weird identity of "pterosaur" is the crest, which we will get to in Pteranodon's entry.

To make up for the gross misjudgement of popular culture...this:

That monster of a pterosaur is Quetzalcoatlus. Yes, that name does come from the Aztec serpent god, Quetzalcoatl. This massive flyer was around during the Late Cretaceous, sharing the land and skies with Pteranodon, T-Rex, and Triceratops. Nobody is really sure what it ate, but the current theory is that it behaved much like a stork.

Quetzalcoatlus has one trait that sets it apart from most "standard" pterosaurs - a long, stiff neck made of perfectly circular vertebrae. Attached to this long neck is a head with a long, pointed beak like the head of a spear. This is normal for the group of pterosaurs called azdharchids - literally, pterosaurs named after a Persian dragon. All of them have long, slender necks that make one wonder how they could fly at all. A fair amount of them are also crested. Impressive creatures, in any case.

So a guy, a giraffe, and a stork-lizard walk into a bar.

Azhdarchid pterosaurs, including Quetzalcoatlus, were the largest pterosaurs in existence. Quetzalcoatlus had a wingspan some 13 meters (~39 feet) across. The beak alone was 8 feet from tip to base. Although Quetzalcoatlus cannot truly claim the title of "biggest," it was pretty impressive. Instead of being compared to other flying birds in size, Quetzy is usually compared to giraffes owing to the long neck and possibly common quadrupedal posture. That's what we're looking at: a giant, flying giraffe that may well have killed things.

We do not know everything about Quetzalcoatlus, however.  We have height and width (including wingspan), but not weight. Most proportions were based off of either extant flying animals (birds, bats) or other pterosaurs (in Quetzy's case, other azhdarchids). This missing data is actually a problem for most pterosaurs, simply because they're so different from any other flying animal, past or present. There are also a few odd azhdarchid pterosaur fossils that may or may not be Quetzalcoatlus, leaving the status of "largest" slightly up for debate. For now, all we can say is "that was one big, alien-looking pterosaur." The largest pterosaur that we can say for sure, in fact.

Source.

Although Pteranodon and the not-pterodactyl remain the most common presentations of pterosaurs in popular media, Quetzalcoatlus has not gone unnoticed. As in the screenshot above, Quetzy remains popular on shows that involve a large variety of prehistoric life. One series gave it ultraviolet vision for a reason that didn't quite make sense. There's a lot of creative potential to be had!

If Pteranodon is popular solely because it's the closest thing we have to a flying dragon, take a look at scale size comparisons of Quetzalcoatlus and a human.If that isn't a wyvern waiting to happen, I don't know what is.

Pterosaur Week: Will the Real Pterodactyl Please Stand Up?

As you all may know, I am a huge fan of pterosaurs. Always have been, hopefully always will be. Why not devote the last week of February to them, then? After all, there's one thing that I was bound to cover here, sooner or later...

Clip art found here.

...this. 

Insofar as my knowledge of pterosaurs goes, no pterosaur that we know about has both a bony crest and a long tail. Rhamphorhynchus was once suspected of having a very small crest, but this was later proven false.What remains is a strange hodgepodge of a pterosaur called a "pterodactyl" that looks a lot more like someone just felt like making a "dragon" (or "wyvern") out of old pterosaur parts. This can be done by combining Quetzalcoatlus, Rhamphorhynchus, and Pteranodon in any way you like. Pterodactylus was something almost entirely different from this nonexistent monstrosity.

Pterodactylus was the first pterosaur ever discovered (1784). It was around during the Late Jurassic, so no, it never got to hang with T-Rex. It likely ate fish and other small animals, and could walk on all fours if need be. Most specimens have been found in Germany.

As you've probably noticed after dissecting the common mishmashed pterosaur, a million different pterosaurs get lumped under the label "pterodactyl." One could make an argument that most pterosaurs fall into the subfamily Pteradactyloidea, but that relationship is farther back than that of foxes and wolves. Technically, "pterodactyl" means "wing-finger," so any pterosaur with a wing-finger (hint: they all have it) could theoretically be called a "pterodactyl." It's technically correct, but you'd have to be even nitpickier than I usually am. It's still not genus Pterodactylus, whatever it is. There are indeed a lot of things in that genus.

Pterodactylus is a waste taxon. Whenever a random pterosaur comes up that doesn't belong to anything else, it goes there. Anything that doesn't belong anywhere else and is not distinctive enough to make scientists go "woah, we really have something different" gets called a pterodactyl. It is literally the most generic pterosaur in existence. It is also the most misrepresented.

Pterodactyls - real Pterodactyli, not the hodgepodge mess- distinguish themselves by not really having any distinguishing features. In general, they are small-sized pterosaurs with no bells or whistles. What many people think of as a "pterodactyl" is likely a Pteranodon or some bastardization thereof. Real pterodactyls were tiny by comparison. We're talking roughly a yard's worth of wingspan. It was tiny.

Love you, Wikipedia.

The image most people have of "pterodactyl" properly belongs to Pteranodon, the large pterosaur with a crest and amazing wingspan. The real Pterodactylus is not in the least bit impressive aside from being the first pterosaur discovered. Don't worry, though; plenty of other "pterodactyls" exist to compensate for the lack of presence. It is still uncanny that the genus that the "pterodactyl" originated from gets so very little presence.


Whew. Rant decades in the making, finally done. This week is going to be a blast.

Creature Feature:

Ever think about how huge an honor it must be to name a dinosaur? The result is then recorded for generations to come- at least, until somebody finds that it belongs to an existing species and needs to be merged. Oh well.

Michael Crichton received the honor of being named after a dinosaur in 2002 when an ankylosaur was dug up in China. The ankylosaur was named Crichtonsaurus bohlini; a second species in the genus was found in 2007. Crichtonsaurus was around during the Late Cretaceous- the last period before the KT event, which wiped out the vast majority of dinos. On the plus side, at least it got to hang with T-Rex, Triceratops, and a bunch of other popular dinos we all know and love.

Don't know who Crichton is? Of course you do. He's the guy who wrote Jurassic Park! Without him, many of us would not be into dinosaurs. Many of us would also not own pet reptiles; Jurassic Park made owning lizards, particularly the frilled dragon, very fashionable. The world would not be the same place without Crichton. He deserves a dinosaur.

Crichtonsaurus was technically a nodosaur, not an ankylosaur. The general idea is still the same: an armored, herbivorous mass of scale and plates. Many ankylosaurs also had a club on their tails which could be used like a mace. They're neat creatures, and this blog needs more of them. It's still far from what one would expect if they heard that the author of Jurassic Park got his own dinosaur.

We want something that'll look cool on a logo, darnit!

Really, though? It doesn't matter if this dinosaur was a clunky, herbivorous tank instead of a massive predator like T-Rex. If anyone deserved a dinosaur named after them, it was the author of Jurassic Park. Without him, the world would be a very different place.

Newsflash: Tapeworm Eggs Found In Prehistoric Sharks.

Although it's easy to focus on giant mammals for an entire week, here's a small reprieve: parasites have been around even longer. (Actually, I couldn't find too many newsworthy things related to ancient mammals.) Tapeworms have been found in the body of a shark from the Permian, a time when mammal-like reptiles were a thing. That was before the dinosaurs, in case you aren't up to snuff with your periods of Earth's history.

The tapeworm cysts were found in the gut of  a 270-million-year-old fossil shark. Given the presence of Brazilian journals, we can safely assume that it was found somewhere in South America.

"Remains of such parasites in vertebrates from this era are rare- of 500 samples examined, only one revealed the tapeworm eggs. This particular discovery helps establish a timeline for the evolution of present-day parasitic tapeworms that occur in foods like pork, fish and beef.

The fossilized eggs were found in a cluster very similar to those laid by modern tapeworms. Some of them are un-hatched and one contains what appears to be a developing larva. According to the study, "This discovery shows that the fossil record of vertebrate intestinal parasites is much older than was previously known and occurred at least 270-300 million years ago."

The fossil described in this study is from Middle-Late Permian times, a period followed by the largest mass extinction known, when nearly 90% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial species died out."- source.

It's kind of humbling to know that tapeworms have lived so long. If you know absolutely nothing about parasites, you know that some parasites have super-specific life cycles. Tapeworms have survived so long precisely because they are simple. Humans can get fish tapeworms, pork tapeworms, beef tapeworms...you name it. The tapeworm is not picky, which explains its amazing endurance over eons.Versatility tends to win out in the long run.

Parasite fanaticism over. Back to your regularly-scheduled mammals. Speaking of, happy Groundhog Day!

Creature Feature: Opabinia.

Has anyone ever wondered why aliens are in everything these days? Only conspiracy theorists, most likely. Has anyone ever wondered why the great majority of them look like little more than humans with makeup? There's the intelligence factor, but the real reason is most likely laziness. If you really want to get creative with aliens, you're going to have to go all the way back to the Cambrian.

Like this thing. Wow, is that even from Earth?

Opabinia above was from an earth waaayyy before the first chordates ever roamed the seas. We're talking the Cambrian (545-525 mya), the first period when life was noticeable in Earth's history. It was found in the Burgress Shale with things like Anomalocaris, so we can assume that these things were at least in British Columbia; a questionable specimen was also found in Australia. It was only about 3 innches long. We don't quite know what this thing ate, in part because of one very obvious trait.

Opabinia had a proboscis that looked and likely worked very much like a jagged elephant trunk. This means it probably ate shell-less, squishy little things from the sea bottom. The wormy schnoz was about a third of the length of this creature's body, and its digestive tract actually did a u-turn inside of its body. Quite twisted for one of the most primitive life forms.

Opabina also had strange limbs. Aside from the gill-covered blades, there are tiny little legs on the underside of the creature's body. They weren't jointed, so Opabinia was not quite an arthropod. The tiny legs may be precursors to arthropod legs, supporting the theory that Opabinia and its kin may be the first steps between annelids (earthworms) and arthropods. Trippy.

There has been some confusion as to Opabinia's family tree. Because of its odd "limbs," people have a hard time classing where exactly Opabinia belongs in the grand scheme of things. All sorts of things have been tossed around: arthropod, annelid-arthropod ancestor, and even the closest living relatives being water bears (tardigrades).

And tardigrades have already been made into aliens.

OPabinia is probably one of the best candidates for an alien design in the entire history of the planet. Ship or creature-get creative. Next time you design an alien race, guys, please be more creative than "generic LGM/human with makeup/reptoid." I've particularly wanted to see an alien with a different, completely inhuman jawline, more like a crow or dolphin. It's fine if you want to put aliens into everything, but think outside the box a little.

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: Apatosaurus.

So I have this theory about the Brontosaurus...



...yeah, it's really Apatosaurus. Allow me to explain.

Apatosaurus was a giant sauropod from the Jurassic Period.  It was over 23 meters (75 feet) long from head to tail. It was a titanic herbivore that, aside from being gargantuan, could use its tail as a whip - either as a weapon or to warn others of danger. Its forelimbs also had strange thumb spikes that may have been used to make nasty marks in predators. Most of them have been found in the Morrison Formation, located in the Southwestern United States.

For those of you with no background in scientific nomenclature, Apatosaurus is a generic name. There are actually several species of Apatosaurus. Since we can't use the typical breeding litmus test to determine species, placing extinct things in the right genera can get tricky.  We have to go by things like size, bone count, and dentition. Given how a skeleton can change over time, this causes some major classification issues.

Old, OLD Apatosaurus assemblage.

Putting dinosaur skeletons together is a lot like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. You have a bunch of pieces before you and they all have to fit together to make one final image. You don't know what it'll look like in the end, but it'll be something.

Now, imagine that you don't have just one jigsaw puzzle on the table. No, instead there are several jigsaw puzzles that have all been mixed together. If you're lucky, some of the pieces have remained stuck together from the last person who assembled them. With no picture to guide you, it is your duty to put the pieces together into something plausible. Kinda makes you feel sorry for paleontologists,  doesn't it?

Brontosaurus excelsius was first classed as Apatosaurus excelsius in 1903. Since then, paleontologists have dismissed Brontosaurus entirely. If Dinosaurs Alive! was correct, the first Brontosaurus specimen was a chimera with Camarasaurus as well. Talk about a mistaken identity.

Now that we actually have the dinosaur named properly, Apatosaurus has become rather popular in film and video games. Littlefoot from the Land Before Time was an Apatosaurus. The first image I posted was from Primeval, whose Wikia makes note of the confusion with Brontosaurus. Basically, if it doesn't have the lumpy head of a Brachiosaurus, the creators probably had Apatosaurus in mind.

Creature Feature: Troodon (or "Reptoids for Dummies.")

It's 2012. That means you all are probably sick of hearing about the apocalypse, the New World Order, or how you're going to Hell for listening to Lady Gaga. There's even the crazy idea that the world is secretly run by a bunch of lizard-people, perhaps explaining some of what The Lizard did during the Spider-Man movie.

Enter reptoid theory- the idea that, somehow or another, we ended up being the puppets of humanoid reptiles. Some say they're from the constellation Draco or another dimension; others say they evolved from dinosaurs like Troodon.

Troodon as a genus contains several species, all of whom were native to North America. They were theropods like the ever-popular Velociraptor, and were only about 2 meters long from snout to tail. Although they were probably carnivorous most of the time, the way their teeth are worn suggests that there may have been vegetation on the menu as well. We think they went extinct in the Late Cretaceous.

As the name would suggest, Troodon had very strange teeth.Unlike most theropods, their teeth were edged like a saw. This has led to a few confusing things: for example, originally, all we had of these guys were the teeth. They were slated alongside pachycephalosaurs (i.e. those dinosaurs with crash helmets) until more complete specimens of Stenonychosaurus were discovered. This dinosaur was later renamed Troodon, but the whole genus is rather shaky. We still don't know why the teeth of a carnivorous dinosaur are serrated like that, but Troodon may have eaten plants, too.

The Troodon we know today also had extremely dextrous hands. Exactly what it used this dexterity for remains a mystery. If it ever used tools, well, we wouldn't be surprised. If it washed fruit with them, so much for being a carnivore.

Remember that entry on Carnotaur? Binocular vision was another one of Troodon's bonuses. This critter is leaning more and more toward the predator side, even though the odd jaw and teeth suggest plant matter as well. Okay, now this is just getting creepy.

So we have an omnivorous dinosaur with dextrous hands, binocular vision, and possibly an omnivorous diet. That's right: They were pretty much the raccoons of the dinosaur age. 

Troodon was also the Einstein of dinosaurs. There's a little something called the EQ- basically, a brain-to-body weight ratio - that theoretically determines how intelligent something was/is. Troodon had an EQ six times higher than that of any other known dinosaur. As per a statement by National Museum  of Canada curator Dave Russell in 1982, if they hadn't gone extinct when they did, they probably would have evolved into a creature similar to humans - perhaps so similar that they would have evolved a placenta. Also, if any dinosaur was capable of surviving a mass-extinction event, it would probably have been a Troodon.

Russell's models.

Suddenly, global warming and the prevalence of reptoids in media make a lot of sense, don't they? Just a thought.

Who's That Pokemon - Unova Edition: Carracosta.

Gen V was not blessed with good fossil Pokemon. One of them, Archen/Archeops, is an Archeopteryx with a terrible ability that halves some of its stats when low on health. Tirtouga/Carracosta, the other fossil, is close to being a good wall and learns Shell Smash, the best stat booster in the game. It is never ever leaving the NU tier simply because, like all turtles, it is very slow.

But it's just a sea turtle, you say? Not that sea turtles aren't amazing creatures, but this turtle's a fossil. That means it's based off of an extinct turtle.  If we want to get really technical, Tirtouga is based off of the ancient Protostega gigas while Carracosta's got more aspects of Archelon ischryos - the largest turtle that ever lived. Archelon was more impressive, so let's hope Protostega fans don't get offended.

Archelon (only one species known) was a huge sea turtle that lived during the Late Cretaceous Period, the time when T-Rex and Triceratops were having epic battles on land and Pteranodon roamed the skies. There is a wide range of things it could have eaten depending on jaw strength - speculation ranges from squid to jellyfish to potentially being an omnivore.  The closest living relatives of Archelon are modern leatherback sea turtles. Most of them have been found in Wyoming and South Dakota.



Archelon was one huge turtle. The largest of them measures 13 feet (4 meters) from head to tail and 16 feet (almost 5 meters) from flipper to flipper. It weighed somewhere around 4,900 pounds (2,200 kg) when alive. Flash back to our turtle soup entry - that's a lot of soup.

Aside from sheer size, Archelon has one more distinctive trait: its shell is, in a way, incomplete. Modern turtles have their backbones fused into their shells, which are also bony - seriously, that whole shell has bone under it. It's like they have an exoskeleton. The Archelon had either leather or detatched bone covering its shell. Someone, somewhere, has probably tracked turtle evolution; it must be fascinating to see a netlike shell like Archelon's become solid over time.

Nobody knows how long individual Archelon lived. Supposedly, there was one that lived around a hundred years.  They may have either slept on the seabeds of North America or brumated depending on the weather. They all went extinct with the dinosaurs regardless. For now, we must make due with digital Archelon and sea turtles. Now if only I could get an Adamant one with awesome IV's... *Crosses fingers.*

Creature Feature: Helicoprion.

As the Monty Python sketch above will tell you, paleontologists can get crazy when it comes to piecing together dead animals. The most notable case is Anomalocaris, in which several of its parts were confused for being parts of different organisms. Juvenile dinosaurs frequently lead to new species due to subtleties in the jaw and spine as well as size.

This is one time I really have to wonder: Are you sure this is right, science?

 

Helicoprion was a strange-looking shark that swam the pre-dinosaur seas (290 m.y.a.). It lived between the Late Carboniferous and Triassic - in land life terms, right after the cool synapsids died and right before the dinosaurs got started. It may have been anywhere from 10-15 feet long.

It also had a jaw that would make most modern horror monsters run screaming in sheer WTF. That jaw could presumably coil and uncoil, lashing rows of sharp teeth at anything it pleased. We aren't exactly sure where it was located, but it was definitely in the lower jaw. Do not let this uncertainty be any consolation- it's the difference between being lashed at by a giant toad or being licked by one of the Xenomorph's inner mouths, neither of which would be any more pleasant if sharp teeth were added.

Nobody really knows what Helicoprion used this weird jaw for. Our best guess is that it was used to pierce ammonites, squidlike molluscs with shells like snails, right in the shell's air chambers. It also could have used that coil to lash out at schools of fish. I will even go out on a limb and suggest 'mating display' if this thing was on the outside, even though sharks don't have visual mating displays today. Regardless of where it was placed, the coil had rows upon rows of sharp teeth, so whatever got in there was put through a meat grinder.

To make this even more disturbing, Helicoprion had relatives. That is how we know science might be right with this one: we have more complete shark skeletons with jaws like that. The whole ocean was filled with sharks that had jaws like buzzsaws. By comparison, our sharks are cute and cuddly.

Awww, look! It's only got ONE set of teeth! 

 

So, the next time one of those killer shark movies comes out, bear the following in mind: Just like you, that shark has teeth inside its mouth as opposed to stuck on a death coil. Science, if you were trying to create a nightmare machine, good work.If you were trying to revive one of Dagon's minions...good luck with that.