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.

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.

Creature Feature: Megatherium.

Sloths are one of the most pathetic, yet adorable, creatures found in nature. They're so slow that algae has the chance to grow on their shaggy fur. The great majority of their time is spent asleep. They don't even have enough energy to properly be considered warm-blooded, making them right alongside naked mole rats in the "mammals that could be considered cold blooded" category.

Would you believe that sloths were once among the largest mammals on the planet?



Ah, Pleistocene megafauna, how we miss you. Megatherium was one of several giant ground sloths. All ground sloths are extinct, living roughly 2 million years ago. Rumor has them surviving all the way into the 1500's. Megatherium was native to South America- the same place where extant sloths live today. Different giant sloths lived in North America.

Megatherium was a giant sloth. By giant, we mean "as big as an elephant." No, seriously; people casually call this beast "elephant-sized." It weighed up to eight tons, and, if on its hind legs, stood at twice the size of an elephant. Mammoths were among the few things larger than Megatherium.  It was a big sloth.



Know what's really scary? This thing could have eaten meat. Paleontologists debate over whether this massive mammal ate meat or not, either by killing the prey itself or by scavenging kills of mega-preds like Smilodon. The bite indicates that its teeth cut as opposed to ground, and there are some limb attachments that make one wonder if it was really an herbivore. Most people think it ate leaves like a rather bulky giraffe. We could compromise and suppose that it was a sort of omnivore, but naahh. Let's stick with plant-eating behemoth for now.

Nobody really knows why Megatherium went extinct. As with nearly every giant mammal, human intervention is likely. A cataclysmic event like a meteor strike may also be to blame. Whatever the cause, the end result is just depressing:

Creature Feature: Irish Elk.

How could I not have done the Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) yet? I have, to date, mentioned it twice.



Oh, right. Deer just are not very weird until you start going prehistoric with them.  This giant deer is dead. It's pushing up daisies. It has CEASED to BE. THIS is an EX-DEER!

 

The Irish Elk, AKA the Giant Deer, lived around 400,000 years ago. Like the aurochs, it was a Pleistocene megabeast. It was not related to any modern elk; it was a HUGE deer, getting approximately 7 feet high at the shoulder. An antler spread of up to twelve feet from tip to tip made a male of the species even more imposing and majestic than that one shot in Bambi.


Then Disney sequelled the hell out of it. 

 The Irish Elk is one of the "textbook standards" for a very specific type of extinction: Its sexually-attractive antlers eventually got so huge that they killed the species. Its rack was either so big that it actually impeded movement, or a climate change simply made that headgear impossible to sustain. Essentially, it was like that overly-decorated cell phone that your best friend has; y'know, the one with so much shiny junk on it that you wonder how the eff it works.


I've seen worse.

Humans played a minimal part in its extinction; after all, we also had cows to deal with back then. The Irish Elk and humans shared space for a good long time; it's not like humans suddenly went around killing these weird giant deer that they had never seen before. Again, the hugeass antlers likely hindered the deer when they tried to avoid hunters. Either way, that headgear was their downfall.

Now, when I say "Irish Elk'd" in an entry, you will know what I mean. Those horns are pimpin', but they ultimately killed the deer.


DAYUMN.

Creature Feature: Three-toed Sloth.

This is my punishment for being so damn slow on these things: Friday's 'take it easy' animal is the Three-Toed Sloth.


(Not the yukkuri.)



How the hell did evolution create this? If a chicken can cross a road, surely a three-toed sloth (genus Bradypus) can. It's flat and slow enough to be mistaken for roadkill.

Sloths were not originally the laziest creatures in the world. They used to be gigantic beasts that gave the African elephant a run for its money as the world's largest land mammal. Like elephants, these mammals were herbivorous, but may have had some animal protein mixed into their diet; several of their adaptations resemble those in carnivorids. (This is controversial, but since the idea of a GIANT carnivore is so intimidating, nature programs capitalize on it.)


Holy ****.

Humans suck, Pleistocene megafauna varies inversely with human activity, BLAH BLAH BLAH. You've heard my shpiel on this before. There are a few rumors of this creature still roaming the Amazon, but the end result of this massive sloth extinction was particularly pathetic.



Sloths went from being massive badasses to creatures that sleep 15-20 hours a day. This thing is so slow that algae grows in its fur as it hangs, day after day, in the treetops of the Amazon. The algal growth provides excellent camouflage; as the animal stays nearly motionless in the treetops, it resembles a pile of dead leaves.


Or Chewbacca's long lost cousin with different teeth.

Three-toed sloths only leave the trees to take a crap; they also urinate more when it rains. That's a lot of timing required to go to the bathroom! It gets weirder: Like naked mole rats, three-toed sloths have extremely slow metabolisms and little to no internal temperature regulation. This makes them akin to big, fuzzy reptiles.

Nobody knows when three-toed sloths mate, but science's best guess is between March-February. Once born, the baby sloth stays attached to its mother's nipple for nine months; it drinks what little milk there is as soon as it is produced.


Born to climb.

Creature Feature: Elephant Bird.

Birds are always the first species to die if humans come on to a crazy island. It happened to the moa, it happened to the dodo, and it happened to two whole genera of giant bird.

The elephant birds - genera Aepyornis and Mullerornis - were ratites (i.e. ostrich-like birds) native to Madagascar. The biggest and most-known elephant bird, Aepyornis maximus, stood about ten feet tall and weighed over 800 pounds. The eggs of this bird were huge - a little more than a yard in circumference (1 meter...stupid U.S. measurements, making no sense) with a length of up to 13 inches.


Pictured: Two eggs and one egghead.

If the name rings a bell, the term 'elephant bird' is also used to describe the rukh (AKA 'roc') from the story of Sinbad. The bird was supposedly large enough to carry elephants into its nest. (In all likelihood, Marco Polo saw a different giant bird, or perhaps assumed that the elephant birds were chicks of a larger, more airworthy bird. The guy mistook a rhinoceros for a unicorn, but was he really dense enough to think that elephant birds could fly?)


HOLY CARP that is an awesome roc! THANK YOU KOREA!

This bird, like the Komodo dragon, was a known case of insular gigantism. It is not at all uncommon for there to be either unusually large or unusually small animals on islands when compared to their mainland counterparts. (For an example of insular dwarfism, look up Jampea reticulated pythons.) Insular gigantism in particular results from a lack of mammalian predators - including humans.

This did not end well.

The presence of humans usually causes a sharp decline in megafauna. Sometimes, this is brought on by over-hunting. Other times, the fauna that humans bring with them kill off the indigenous life. Still other times, humans just speed up a situation that could have brought the animals under threat.

All three factors are thought to have caused the elephant birds to die out. Elephant bird eggshells are often found near old fires; chickens and guinea fowl may have spread diseases to the giant birds; given the widespread nature of these birds, climate change probably put extra pressure on them. This was not a case of stupid cavemen wiping out their giant prey animals, either; the elephant bird lived at least into the 17th century.


Why couldn't the natives have bred them into chocobos? Nobody would make those extinct. Nobody.

It turns out that at least one species of tree may have needed the elephant birds to help disperse their seeds, similar to how some trees in Australia need death machines cassowaries to bring about the next generation. Our bad, Madagascar.