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: 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...