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.

Creature Feature: Glyptodon.

Cool though MonHunt may be, the majority of its monsters are reptilian. This tends to be a running theme with monsters in general; insectoids and reptiles are strange enough to scare most people, so, with the oddball exception of wolves, mammals don't show up in many horror movies. Maybe it's about time we fixed that.

Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Well, here's a strange mammal for you! It's a Glyptodon, and was native to South America in the Pleistocene Epoch. That's the same time when all the mammals we know and love, including people, were in odd, freakish proto-forms. Luckily, we're petty sure this one's an herbivore. There were four species in the genus, each of which can be identified by the patterns on the shell.

Armadillos are already strange little things. This is a prehistoric armadillo- that usually means it's bigger and even freakier. Glyptodon was about the size and weight of a Volkswagon Beetle. Let that sink in a minute: an armadillo the size and weight of a small car. OK, minute over.

Unlike modern armadillos, Glyptodon did not have a flexible shell. Its shell was so rigid that its spine was fused to the thing, much like a modern-day turtle's. Glyptodon was capable of tucking its armored head and tail over its vulnerable underbelly, making itself an unappetizing rock of a mammal. This is considered convergent evolution, as ankylosaurs and turtles share similar adaptations.

One thing we aren't sure on concerning this beast is its face. There's a space in its skull for a nose, but we aren't sure what kind of nose it had. The best guess is a tapir-ish trunk. Soft tissue doesn't preserve well, so a proboscis like that is a legitimate guess. Have fun seeing it in your nightmares.

The Glyptodon probably went extinct because of humans. As we've said before, wherever humans live, megafauna tends to die. It's nothing personal - it just tends to happen. Since humans were around for this, you'd expect drawings...but nope. Plushies, however, are a thing:

Source.

Don't be afraid to think outside the box. There were Glyptodon in Ice Age, and we're sure GameFreak could make a Pokemon out of this. There are plenty of strange mammals, both living and dead. Not everything has to be bugs and reptiles.

Creature Feature: Liopleurodon.

"It's a magical Liopleurodon!"

If you live on the internet, the above phrase should be strikingly familiar to you. It comes from the extremely odd Flash movie called Charlie the Unicorn. The first of the series features a Liopleurodon sprawled across a giant rock. So, what is a Liopleurodon, anyways?

Liopleurodon is a genus of extinct, short-necked pleisiosaur (pliosaur) containing two species. These marine reptiles lived during the Jurassic Period, joining Stegosaurus as one of the few well-known archosaurs from that time frame. They have been found mostly in England and France, which you'd think would merit a more uppity-sounding name.

Liopleurodon was one of the big ones.  The biggest specimen of L.ferox was roughly 21 feet long. People trying to cash in on Liopleurodon will tell you otherwise, sometimes replacing "feet" with "meters" to create a sea monster of gargantuan proportions. There were bigger pliosaurs. For some reason, the misconception of a giant Liopleurodon has stuck.



Pliosaurs, including Liopleurodon, had very powerful bites. Look at that huge jaw on a stocky neck - it's like a crocodile mixed with a pit bull. The exact opposite applies to plesiosaurs normally; Nessie, for example, has a tiny head on a long neck. One pliosaur was thought to be capable of biting through granite, but unfortunately, we have no means of testing.

Liopleurodon is one of paleontology's sweethearts. It's a giant carnivore, and has been treated like one in series such as Walking With Dinosaurs (which got its size grossly wrong). There's also a neat bit with a Lio versus a Megalodon- a giant, extinct shark. Oh, and when Liopleurodon is not being a killer, it shows magical unicorns the way to candy mountain. Y'know, even though it didn't say anything.

Creature Feature: Springtails.

By request of one of our readers, we began looking stuff up on insect evolution. It's not covered too often, so the request was more than welcome. This led to our discovery of the oldest insect in the world, Rhyniognathus hirsti.

Source.

Wait a sec. What is that? Not in this blog's usual WTF way, but really, that fossil's hard to see. 
So here's the next best thing: a living fossil of an insect called a springtail.

Boing!

Actually, we aren't even sure if springtails are insects. Some people think that they diverged from insects a while back, and thus deserve their own class (Entognatha). They have most of the right stuff- six legs, exoskeleton, etc. - but also have some traits that stick out. Unlike most insects, they never really metamorphose, and don't have external mouthparts. Also, as per the name, springtails possess a long structure in their rears (called a "furcula") that lets them jump. That last one doesn't keep them from being insects - it's just cool.

Springtails go way back. They go so far back that the first bug ever was first thought to be Rhyiella praecursor - a basal springtail. The same chert section with R. praecursor held the fossil first mentioned up above. This makes springtails among the first arthropods to ever walk on land. No wonder their taxonomy is confused.

Springtails may be creepy, but are they harmful? Yes and no. They are agricultural pests at worst, a title shared with many insects. They are, however, sensitive to herbicides and many other soil alterations. One springtail in particular is used as a model organism to test for potentially-toxic soil. See? They're not all bad.

If you wish to find springtails, well, this was an entry covering a whole class of bizarre little arthropods. Springtails are tiny, but can be found beneath leaves and in other humid places. As shown above, they are tiny, and frequently confused with fleas. They eat decaying matter and keep microoorganisms in check. Plus, they bounce; there's not much to hate, even though some people thing any creepy crawly is legitimately creepy.

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.

Megafauna Week: Baluchitherium.

This is it. This is the big one. No, really, I've ended this week with one of the biggest mammals of all time. Anyone who knows their paleos probably saw the grand finale coming from a mile away. For those of you who have no idea what Baluchitherium is, however, feast your eyes:

The behemoth above is a titan among titans. It is one of perhaps a few different indricotheres, or "holy CARP that is a big mammal." Just like with the Elasmotherium, indricotheres were related to rhinoceroses. We're pretty sure this one was a browser, making this gigantic beast the unofficial bastard child of a rhinoceros and a giraffe. Its name comes from the first specimen being discovered in Baluchistan, Pakistan. It lived during the Oligocene epoch- 34-23 million years ago. It probably inspired a great deal of monsters if any survived alongside humans.

The first thing that one will notice when researching indricotheres is that the classification is very, very hazy. The species are distinguished by subtle skeletal differences. Paleontologists debate whether this is sexual dimorphism, maturity, or indeed different species from the same genus. Thus the same creature (more or less) has different names, including Baluchitherium, Paraceratherium, and Indricotherium. It's hard to identify distinct species when they can't make babies anymore. We think they're all the same genus.

Baluchitherium was the largest land mammal known. It averaged 5 meters (16 feet) at the shoulder and 8 meters (~26 feet) from nose to rear. The image above showed exactly how small a human was relative to this beast. No matter how many measurements I give, it will not do this creature justice. Just...look at this thing:

From Wiki, and apparently taken at the Tokyo Natural History Museum. Japan really does have giant monsters.

As the largest land mammal ever, Baluchitherium has made quite a dent in popular culture. It has been featured on prehistoric nature shows, sure, but the influence extends beyond that. This behemoth was the inspiration for the AT-AT Walkers in Star Wars, and it shows. The Digimon "SkullBaluchimon" is unfortunately a misnomer; it just barely looks like Baluchitherium, although its backstory as being made of counterfeit fossils justifies the dissimilarity. Does this mean we would be any less scared to encounter a Baluchitherium, much less a digital skeleton of one, in a dark alley? Of course we'd still be scared shitless! This is the biggest mammal in Earth's history, dead or alive.

It'll haunt you in your nightmares, too.

Megafauna Week: Elasmotherium.

Ah, unicorns.  What would be cooler than meeting a unicorn? Wouldn't it be awesome if unicorns were, y'know, real? Then that unicorns VS zombies book would actually have some merit, and bronies would not be up in our faces anymore.

The good news: Macro Polo saw one. Here's what he wrote:

They have wild elephants and plenty of unicorns, which are scarcely smaller than elephants. They have the hair of a buffalo and feet like an elephant’s. They have a single large black horn in the middle of the forehead . . . They are very ugly brutes to look at. They are not at all such as we describe them when we relate that they let themselves be captured by virgins, but clean contrary to our notions.

It has long since been decided that Marco Polo was describing a rhinoceros, not a pretty white unicorn found on some chick's binder. Still, fossil evidence suggests that the traveler may have been onto something:

Chaaarrrlliiiiieee!

If the narwhal and oryx were not inspiration for the unicorn, one might suggest fossil evidence of the Elasmotherium, a relative of the rhinoceros. It lived from the Pliocene to the Pleistocene, and may have been around as recently as 50,000 years ago - old enough for a few people to have seen it and drawn it in caves. They spanned much of Asia and into Europe.

The most outstanding trait of this giant herbivore was the single horn on its face. Although "unicorn" or "monoceros" may refer to almost anything with one horn, only Elasmotherium has the horn placed right where the modern notion of "unicorn" has it - on the forehead. It was characterized as being capable of galloping based on having longer legs than most rhinoceros-like animals. We think it ate grass like a horse, too. Even with narwhals and oryx around, the Elasmotherium strikes one as a very likely basis for unicorns indeed.

Cave drawing from France.

^{So just how big was the real unicorn? Think 15-16 feet from head to tail. A basketball player could barely reach the top of its shoulder. It weighed 3-4 tons. Although far from the petite, slender creature depicted everywhere nowadays, Elasmotherium was still pretty amazing as far as unicorns go. Sorry, Twilight Sparkle was completely made up.}

Cheer up, fantasy fans. Unicorns were once real. Sure, they weren't the prancing ponies we know today, but they were still around. The best part is, you'll never see a Christian arguing that unicorns never existed; they're in the Bible.

Megafauna Week: Intro + Titanoboa.

 Pinch, punch, last week of the month! You know what that means: It's a Theme Week! This month's theme is MEGAFAUNA. Let me say it in bigger letters:

MEGAFAUNA!!!!

Megafauna, in general, means "any animal larger than a human that has not been domesticated." The term can apply to both extant and extinct species. The term is usually reserved for giant, extinct animals that were much larger than their modern day counterparts. Giraffes, elephants, and many other famous African animals are also properly megafauna.  Believe it or not, the aurochs, the ancestor to the modern cow, was megafauna. We have bred cattle down a lot, and they're still pretty darn big. 

That said, there will be a lot of extinct creatures this week, too. Megafauna tends to vary inversely with human population - that is, the more humans there are in an area, the less megafauna there will be. There are a number of reasons for this.The most obvious is that humans are a lot like wolves in that anything big against us falls to coordinated effort. Less obvious things include competition for resources and habitat destruction (which kinda falls under "resources," in retrospect). Basically, humans and megafauna do not mix well.

So, without further ado, onto the first member of the heavyweight class:

Surprise, surprise: this week is starting with a giant snake. For those of you who have not seen this monster, its name was Titanoboa and it died out long before humans walked the Earth (so your hands are clean). The only known species, Titanoboa cerrejonensis, was found in the coal mines of Columbia.

Titanoboa was a giant, even among modern giant snakes. It was 48 feet long and weighed over 2,500 pounds. To put things in perspective, the longest snake, the reticulated python, is at least 10 feet shy of that. It was about as wide as a garbage can, if not slightly bigger. As for how dangerous it was, I believe the following demotivator makes the point best:

(Disclaimer: I love giant snakes.)

The discovery of a snake this big tells us a few very important things about its environment. For starters, there had to be prey big enough to accommodate such a large snake; large snakes need large food, after all. Huge reptiles also tend to live in tropical climates, meaning that Columbia was still hot millennia ago.

Before you ask, no, this snake did not eat dinosaurs. Titanoboa appeared in the Paleocene, around 60-58 million years ago. That is the time directly after the period when dinosaurs went extinct. If there were dinosaurs for it to eat, they would have been the stragglers from the KT event that refused to evolve into birds. The Paleocene had plenty of large mammals, birds, and reptiles for Titanoboa to feed on regardless.

Pop culture loves picking on giant snakes, and Titanoboa is no exception. The Smithsonian has a rather extensive page on Titanoboa, including what it would take to support one in a zoo. Primeval: New World also featured a Titanoboa, overlapping it with a Native American legend. Giant snakes are pretty common in folklore; who's to say that someone didn't discover Titanoboa before modern science? 

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: Horned Gophers.

Looking at the design of one of the latest Pokemon, Chespin, made me notice something: it is really, really hard to make rodents anywhere near badass. Even giant rodents like capybaras are seen as buck-toothed meat. Adding horns and fire to a fuzzy mouse wouldn't make it any more -

Oh, wait a second. That actually looks pretty cool. Still not intimidating, but cool. 

Horned gophers (Ceratogaulus) were once very real, very alive creatures.  There are four species known in the genus, all of which had nasal horns like small, fuzzy rhinos. They lived in burrows, much like modern gophers. Presumably, they were also herbivorous. They lived in what is now the modern U.S. Great Plains, particularly Nebraska, in the Miocene and Pleistocene eras. Everything cool there is dead.

Horned gophers had many things in common with modern rodents and moles, which are not rodents (so please hold your Gurren Lagann jokes). They had flat paws with sharp claws that were perfect for digging, and thus likely spent much of their time in burrows. These gophers were just shy of a foot long, so even if they had facial horns, they were far from terrifying. This makes horned gophers the smallest horned mammals to date. A shame they're all extinct.

To this day, nobody really knows what those horns were for. They're the wrong shape for digging. Moderns rodents similar to these gophers have terrible vision, so a mating display is virtually out of the question. The best guess, judging by the horns' positioning, is that the horns were used as a defense against predators. They even evolved further towards that end as the species progressed.  This rodent had teeth and horns for any preds to deal with. Not bad for a rodent!

The horned gopher's unique look has not gone unnoticed by the media. Although you will never see these guys in Jurassic Park, games like Tiny Zoo offer them as extinct oddities. They are fairly popular as far as small, extinct mammals go. I kinda wish the new Primeval would have one as a mascot character.

Oh, hey, speaking of...

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: Pakicetus.

Yeah, no "They Actually Eat That" today. That's for tomorrow, when everybody in America will be bloated on the disgustingly-fattening food served on Thanksgiving, including corn. You're welcome.

For now, please have something far more pleasant: Fossil Fighters's answer to Vaporeon:

Except...wait, this is Fossil Fighters. Does this mean that Vaporeon were once real?

Ahaha, no. Paki up there is a Pakicetus, a prehistoric mammal that is considered a direct link between mesonychids (badass carnivorous ungulates). It was found in Pakistan (hence the name) with a number of other whale fossils and whale relatives, and lived around 50 million years ago in the Eocene. As one might expect, it was a piscivore. The creature was first identified as a whale relative by its earbones, in case you were wondering.

The first mysterious thing about this creature is where it was found. Pakistan, a place that is largely desert, has an abundance of ancient whale skeletons. The simple answer to why: Land shifts. The land evolved, and so did the life on it. Pakistan was once coastal. This led to a bunch of well-preserved whale skeletons as whales evolved from carnivorous ungulates. Neat.

Pakicetus is the first obvious transition animal between whales and land-bound mammals. The eyes are located on top of the skull, making it look almost like a crocodile. It lived on a coastal region in its time, leading to a theory that it may have first hunted in tide pools. There are a million different speculations about how Pakicetus lived - largely related to exactly how water-bound this whale of a mammal was.

There are debates over how aquatic Pakicetus was. The heavy bones suggest that it was at least partially-aquatic. The ears are more favored for hearing in air, but that didn't stop paleontologists from placing it near whales on the Tree of Life. Others have called it "no more aquatic than a tapir." Whatever the case, we're pretty sure it didn't have a tail fluke...although that would be awesome.

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.

Belated Bio-Art: Dinosaurs Alive!

Phew.

The trip to Ohio completely exhausted me. I got my first roller coaster headache; the nephews, put together, were a real hassle; the drives there and back were long and tiring. I was tired for DAYS on end.

Y'know what made it worth it? DINOSAURS.  Kings Island had a whole sub-park full of them! Here, have some! (Warning: Pic-heavy.)



 This fellow was right inside the gate to Kings Island. It's either a Dilophosaurus or a Monoloph - either way, cool!

Carnotaurus- my favorite giant theropod. Look at the horns, not the useless arms.

 Ah, Stegosaurus - one of the few dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that was actually from the Jurassic.

Anhinguera, one of the freakier pterosaurs out there. They had another, smaller one suspended later on the park.

I have a theory about the Brontosaurus. Unfortunately, these are proper Apato's, so it doesn't really count.

Finally, the exhibit ended with a T-rex VS Triceratops showdown. OK, technically not - the sign rightfully pointed out that adult preds usually don't go after healthy adult herbivores. After seeing "Rex VS Triceratops" on the map, it still felt a little bit like a cheat.

Now, should you make a trip to Ohio just to see a park full of robot dinosaurs? I'm going to be honest and say that this one's entirely your call. Is it cool to see that many robot dinosaurs in one place? Sure. Have I seen better? Yes (the Kokoro ones at the Sue exhibit were awesome). If you're going to Kings Island anyways, by all means shell out the extra 5 bucks to see Dinosaurs Alive!. I'm just not 100% sure if it's worth going far out of your way to see. Peace, and more pics tomorrow!

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.