Awesome Dead Shit: Brontotheres

Normally when you see "bronto-" as a prefix it's safe to assume some stupid effing dinosaur shit is about to go down, but NOT TODAY SATAN.

"Bronto" simple means "thunder" and today we are not talking about some trivial thunder lizards, we are talking about the ten times cooler mammal version, the brontotheres. Also known as:

Amy's new indie band name (drawings by Ray Troll)

Awesome Dead Shit of the Whatever Time Period We Damn Well Please: Chalicotheres

Hey! We live. We do, despite the dramatic slow-down in posting (sorry!). And you know what else lived once? Chalicotheres, which are essentially what happens when a horse-rhino gets jealous of a gorilla's cool locomotion skills, and becomes the most awkward animal that ever lived.

Chalicotheres: Evolution's Version of the 80's.
From AMNH Library Special Collections Neg No. 36900

Awesome Dead Shit: Amynodonts

It's that time of the month again! No, no, calm down - not time for more genitals, just some awesome dead shit.

This month we're talking about the family Amynodontidae, an extinct group of perissodactyls (odd-toed ungulates like horses, tapirs, and rhinos) that lived in North America, Europe, and Asia from the middle Eocene until the early Miocene.

The Winnie the Pooh of the Paleo World

Awesome Dead Shit of the Whatever Time Period We Damn Well Please: Crocodylus anthropophagus

This month(ish, whatever) we are featuring one of our cold-blooded cousins, Crocodylus anthropophagus. For those of you who don't speak greek, let's break down the scientific name: the word "anthropos" means "human" in Greek and "phagos" is the Greek word of "eater." Yes, that's right, the human-eating crocodile.

It's all fun and games until someone's ancestor gets eaten by an enormous extinct crocodile.

The existence of this man-eater brings Amy a particularly large amount of joy right now. See, Amy joined an Anthropology department where she gets to cuddle dead monkeys (you can follow that horror-fest on Instagram if you like) and loves it, but she also has to take a lot of other anthropology classes cuz nothing in this world can be perfect.

And so, a poor vertebrate paleontologist with a background in geology can feel like being the odd duck out in an anthropology department. Amy occasional suffers from apoplectic fits about the small number of specimens but huge number of conclusions drawn in many scientific papers about human evolution. This month to metaphorically work out some of that "human evolution is stupid" rage she is supremely pleased to discuss the only Plio-Pleistocene animal that brings her true happiness, the ancient crocodiles that ate the human ancestors everyone places so much damned importance on.

Awesome Dead Shit: Glyptodonts

Amy saw an armadillo last week so she is now inspired to write about some of their extinct cousins, the glyptodonts.

Awesome art by NachoSammich

Glyptodonts were crazy cool mammals that lived during the Pleistocene Epoch from 2.58 Ma until they went extinct about 10,000 years ago, possibly from climate, disease, or from people over-hunting them and using their shells as emergency shelters. Talk about a fulfilling meal! They lived in South America and migrated as far north as Arizona and Texas during the Great American Biotic Interchange about 2 million years ago along with some other South American fauna, like our old friend Thylacoleo. This biotic interchange was the first time South America had come into contact with another continent since the breakup of Gondwana back in the Mesozoic, meaning that the South American fauna had ~63 million un-interrupted years of evolution all to themselves, which is why those endemic species are so flippin' WEIRD. Glyptodonts are no exception to that rule and belong in the superorder Xenarthra along with sloths, anteaters, and armadillos, which of course means they are phylogenetically awesome.

Awesome Dead Shit: The Saber Toothed Salmon

Meet Oncorhychus (previously known as Smilodonichthys) rastrosus, the Saber Toothed Salmon:

Hey people of Eugene, see this exhibit in person! Art by Ray Troll

We've mentioned it in passing here and there, featured a blurb about the new Saber Toothed Salmon exhibit at the UO MNCH during our Ray Troll interview, but have we really explained the beauty of this extinct fish? No, no we have not. Let us list the ways:

Double the Fields, Double the Fun with Julius Csotonyi

Julius Csotonyi has probably got the most dichotomous resume we've ever heard of: he paints dinosaurs for a living, and publishes on living microbes. Julius's painting work is often featured in books and research papers, and this week he has released a new book about his artwork and artistic process called "The Paleoart of Julius Csotonyi." We interviewed Julius about his book, his science, and why on Earth he chose to go with microbes (turns out, he was aware there were things with backbones and fur even before he made his choice!)

Awesome Dead Shit: Odobenocetops, the Walrus-Whale

What do you get when you take the droopy-lipped visage of a walrus and say, why the hell not, let's attach it to a whale?

Pure, undiluted genius, that's what you get.

 Yes, this monstrosity that nature shoved together to confuse you was a real animal: the gloriously graceful Odobenocetops, or walrus-whale!

Such beauty and grace should never have gone extinct.
Damn you mother nature, for taking away this marvel of natural selection.

Awesome Dead Shit: Thylacoleo

Thylacoleo was a genus of carnivorous marsupials that lived in Australia from the Late Oligocene to the Late Pleistocene, when they sadly went extinct. This genera of triple-incisor meat-eaters ranged from about that of a large house cat to poop-your-pants-it's-a-lion in size. Thylacoleo carnifex (pictured above lying in child's pose) was the largest of the group, and was the biggest predator of it's day. Here we present some fun facts about this pouched lion and then we take our audience on a wonderful tour of recreated Thylacoleo art, oh goodie!!

Awesome Dead Shit: Archaeoindris, the Giant Lemur

Meaghan thinks she is oh so clever, making Amy publish blog posts about mushrooms while she was away in Spain. Well, payback's a bitch so this month all y'all bloggers are gonna read about fuckin' giant LEMURS!!

Welcome to Meaghan's new nightmares++

Sloth lemurs (Palaeopropithecidae) are a family of extinct primates  that grew to extreme sizes, with Archaeoindris weighing in as top dog. Archaeoindris was first described by Herbert Standing in 1909 based on jaw fragments, and soon a complete skull was discovered. Unfortunately, there have only been six postcrania bones found with no hands or feet in the mix, making locomotion estimates far and few. Mass estimates, on the other hand, are readily available but all of them make Amy and Meaghan want to cry, though their tears will hopefully make Edward Davis very proud.

Awesome Dead Shit: Prototaxites

When Amy has nightmares, they take one of two general forms: either all prosimians go extinct (OH GOD NO!) or it somehow involves giant mushrooms, of which she is irrationally opposed. So today to be an asshole, Meaghan is going to tell you all a lot about Prototaxites, the giant mushroom!

Prototaxites: Nature's threatening fungus-dildo

Awesome Dead Shit: Squaloraja

Yes, that is a fossil not a sedimentary rorschach diagram - in fact, it is a cartilaginous fish. Our very own patron saint of paleontology Mary Anning found this bad boy in the early 1880's. Mary Anning sold the fossil to John Nash Sanders, but either she hadn't found the tail at the time that she prepared the fossil, or simply hadn't finished prepping it, but either way Squaloraja polyspondyla was originally described sans its tail, and sketched by Mary Anning as follows:

The body and tail were never reunited. Sad times... except that the body got asploded during the Bristol Blitz, and so the tail was the only part that survived (being housed elsewhere at the time). So yay?

Different Squaloraja, not exploded

So why was Squaloraja such an important find? Mary noted that the specimen shared characteristics of both living sharks and rays, causing general confusion. Remember how everyone thought nothing went extinct back then? Now we know that it is a member of the Order Chimaera (ratfish), one of the oldest and most diverse family of cartilaginous fishes. The closest living relatives of Chimaera are ratfish, though cartilaginous fish  split nearly 400 million years ago. Squaloraja showed up around about 200 million years ago, and it should not be too surprising that, considering its ancestry, it looks like a shark/ray hybrid critter. While epic in appearance, the Squaloraja lifestyle was pretty tame; it was a bottom feeder that lived in shallow marine settings.

Squaloraja is at the bottom

The Vengeance Team shares a little place in their hearts for cartilaginous fishes, especially since their Vertebrate Paleontology class. While studying the evolutionary history of fishes (fascinating mmhmm zzzzzz) they realized something, cartilaginous fish had bones, but then they lost them! Sharks and chimaera stem from bony fish ancestors (see shark family tree below) and some of these guys had bones. This means sharks and rays secondarily lost bones in favor of cartilage, oh snap.

Ray Troll beautifully illustrates the evolutionary tree of fish. Squaloraja would fit in up by the Chimaeras.


http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=oxwrAAAAYAAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA386&dq=squaloraja&ots=GFfdeitjry&sig=xQGXm8OtdEjEw2dm4dJsyIxaS7s#v=onepage&q=squaloraja&f=false

Awesome Dead Shit: Macrauchenia

We were going to call this "Awesome Dead Thing of the Month,"  but let's be real: creating a "monthly" event is just going to end in disappointment for all. So here we are instead, scrounging for titles and trying not to commit to a temporally-set re-occurrence (DON'T BOX US IN), and the first one we're going to talk about is Macrauchenia.

You might be saying, WTF guys, way to not start out strong, what is this animal that looks vaguely like the word macaroni? Well, that's actually a pretty good comparison: this is an animal that had a body sort of like a llama (hence the "chenia" in the name, which is a reference to the old genus name for that group), with a face very much like a macaroni noodle. Observe:

Yeah, it sorta looks like Dumbo got teased one-too-many times about the size of his ears and went to visit Michael Jackson's all-natural-plastics doctor, or perhaps a llama got too invested in sniffing at a tube sock. But of course, as is ALWAYS THE CASE IN PALEONTOLOGY, Macrauchenia was related to neither of these.