The town of Drumheller, Alberta is famous for being the home of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, a huge paleontology museum dedicated to the fossils of Canada (and beyond). There are lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of extinct chickens (aka dinosaurs) in Canada, so there are lots of dinos at the Royal Tyrrell, SO THERE ARE LOTS OF (really weird) DINOSAUR STATUES IN DRUMHELLER AND WE TOOK SELFIES WITH THEM ALL*!!!!!
Enjoy the photo montage of ridiculousness that ensues when two mammal paleontologists are vacationing in Canada. Or skip this post and come back in like 2-6 months when we finally write something new and/or meaningful again.
You know you want to see the rest of this dumbfuckery.
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.
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.
Thanks to the wonders of modern technology the Vengeance Team has been able to track the traffic sources of our blog. While Blogger tracks which web pages people come in from, it more importantly records the key search terms people have entered that have led them to Mary Anning's Revenge. This has brought something important (and probably intuitive) to our attention: you are all a bunch of perverts.
In addition to being a source of filth beyond comprehension, it turns out the key google search terms that lead people to our blog are also full of mystery and intrigue. Our favorites include "genitalia 14 weeks" because that's a long fucking time, guys - OR IS IT THE OPPOSITE, is that how long you get to keep your genitals?? We will never truly know. "Monkey bites own penis off" and "animal big ugly ass" were pretty obvious choices for our blog, but we're a little offended by being found with "sex with you will suck." Most intriguing of all is the truncated search sentence of "does your butt swell when you're..." the end of which has been lost to time and space and will pique our curiousity forever... even if googling it did lead to a lot of unwanted info about hemorrhoids.
Since clearly you are all fascinated by penises and the weird ways animals use them, we decided to share with our readers another incredible prehensile penis. It's one of Meaghan's favorite critters - so coordinated that its nose matches its junk, this creature's schlong could be mistaken for an enormous pink boa constrictor with a depth perception problem. Ladies and gentlemen, we present to you the tapir.
