Bio-Art: Fossil Fighters.

Is that the most badass way to start a week of entries or what?

For the past week or so, I've been hooked on the sequel to the above game: Fossil Fighters Champions. I was a total addict for the first Fossil Fighters, too. In a nutshell, the whole premise of the game is digging up fossils, reviving superpowered dinosaurs, and then pitting them against each other in death matches. It's cracktastic.

If you are familiar with Japanese 'mon' series, two should immediately come to mind: Pokemon and Dinosaur King. Yes, this is another one of those infamous monster fighting games from Japan. If one fused the basic idea of Dinosaur King with the bright colors of Pokemon, one would get something like Fossil Fighters...but not quite.

If Tefflaceras is indeed a thing, I'm sure it didn't have wings like that. Also, Ancient Fairy Dragon just got competition.

Fossil Fighters blows both Pokemon and Dinosaur King out of the water. The stories for both games, although a bit predictable in places, are amazingly dark for kids' games (one involves David Icke's reptoids; another, necromancy)  and have nice little twists that I never saw coming. The element system is simple, the battle mechanics strategic (beware of rotating moves!), and the attacks, while a mite unrealistic (although dinosaurs just snapping at each other WOULD get old after a while) are pretty darn cool. The game was popular enough to spawn a sequel, Super Fossil Fighters/Fossil Fighters Champions, which featured a few new mechanics and online play.

The Vivosaur (we have to be fair: plesiosaurs, pterosaurs, and ancient mammals aren't dinosaurs) designs were among the best little Easter eggs of the game for me. The designs often have to do with the meaning of the dinosaur's name, which, as a linguist, is a real treat. For example, "Krona," a giant mosasaur, has Roman numerals on its body like a clock (think "chronological," "chronic," etc.). Coatlus, based off of Quetzalcoatlus and my favorite Vivosaur in the first game, is modeled after its namesake feathered serpent deity. Krypto, who only appears in FFC/Super, is modeled after Anubis, the Egyptian god of mummification (i.e. crypts). I could go on with this. There are a lot of in-jokes being ignored.

Crysosaurus has ice on it in this game? Noooo...really?

I cannot think of a better way for kids (and anyone else) to learn about ancient fauna. Aside from dinosaurs, the original Fossil Fighters also had prehistoric mammals like Andarch (Andrewsarchus) and the rather bizarre Jara (a tapejarid pterosaur). Fossil Fighters Champions has ventured into invertebrates, fish, and synapsids. There are several times I have gone "that's a thing?" at something in Fossil Fighters, only to go online and find out that, yes, things like slingshot deer actually existed. The series overall contains 90% real paleos and 10% "fun" creatures, such as chickens and aliens. Hardcore paleontologists will be impressed with you after playing this game - just don't ask if T.rex ever had a Harley-ish paintjob. The answer is no.

So, is it worth giving a try? If you've ever enjoyed Pokemon and/or loved dinosaurs, you betcha. The storylines are more carefully thought-out than anything Pokemon has ever concocted. Some of the dinosaurs are really creative; you'll laugh when you see the ankh on the Ankylosaurus. Effort and heart went into these games, and if they improve your hand-eye coordination and paleo knowledge, so much the better. The graphics are much better in FFC/Super, especially in the cut scenes, but there are some elements of the first game that I still love. If Pokemon falls to the ancient behemoths of Fossil Fighters, all I'll have to say is "it's about damn time." This is a must-see for any fan of video games with a love of prehistoric creatures.

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: Cynognathus.

When most people think ancient, they think dinosaurs. There is a strange mystique about the Mesozoic - an era without all the cute fuzzy things we know and love today? If you're lucky, you will know that dinosaurs shared their lives with mammals and mammal-like reptiles. Not that anybody points synapsids out beyond Dimetrodon.

Permian and early Mesozoic mammals are cool. Hell, Fred Flintstone could have had something that looked a LOT more like a dog than Dino:

Arf!

Ain't it cute?

That furry embodiment of the Uncanny Valley is a Cynognathus - literally "dog jaw." It was found in most parts of the Southern hemisphere, including China and Antarctica. Google Imaging reveals several possible catlike coat variations, but the jaw - you know, the thing science actually has to work with - resembles a canid more than a felid, leading to a lot of names involving dogs and wolves.

Cynognathus lived alongside smaller dinosaurs in the Triassic Period. It was a synapisid - a mammal-like reptile with some traits of reptiles, but the jaws and earbones of mammals. Its limbs are a particularly good demonstration of this strange blend: The forelimbs are spread like a lizard's, but the hindlimbs have the more vertical orientation of a mammal's. Who wouldn't want one as a pet?


Oh, Korea...this time, thanks.

Despite its cute look and interesting anatomy, few efforts have been made to get the Cynognathus out into the media. The only instance I know of is Ghost Hound - an anime series with a fair amount of prehistoric creatures that appear as 'ghosts.' Cynognathus was, unfortunately, outshone by a certain inugami (a creature that merits its own essay or two, as well as a cracked-out art piece). The idea that 'ghosts' of prehistoric animals remain has a ring of truth; many a monster could be explained if, somewhere out of the corners of our eyes, we caught a glimpse of our own evolutionary past. (Eva, interested in helping me with a cap for this one?)


My crack breeding project has come to life!