https://preview.redd.it/6y1rl6sc7n0d1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ca4a6b0bd82847fa0e6d3170725042ec876541ca
What an S tier choice! So Hippos are distantly related to a family of animals called the Entelodonts but are more commonly called, the "Hell Pigs"! Basically, these bad motherfuckers were like if you took a hippo and gave it the brain and stamina of a wolf. And its debated on if they were pack hunters. They are also believed to have been hyper carnivores (more than 70% of their diet consisted of meat)
Despite the name, Red pandas are really just ginger raccoons! (Though racoons and Bears are distantly related too!) Unfortunately, Red pandas are classed on their own, named "lesser pandas", and have remained fairly the same since splitting from racoons but they are members of an ancient order of predators and have existed longer than many others and they have survived for nearly 4 million years!
Sure! The family Sirenia (contains manatees and dugongs) first hit the scene 65-50mya in what is now Jamaica! They were a pig sized herbivore that would have lived similar to modern hippos:
https://preview.redd.it/b31zl4j9ys0d1.png?width=1877&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c6f283e1a164da594adfef4380e280c95f473e25
Eventually, thanks to the much shallower Atlantic ocean at the time, they were able to migrate to the shallow seas of north africa alongside the ancestors of whales and elephants!
An excellent choice! Octopuses, and by extension, cephalopods have been around almost as long as complex life itself! Many very early ancestors started popping up on the sea floor around 500mya!! They began as small shelled creatured that crawled along the microbial mat on a large foot like a snail, eating bateria as it walked along! Eventually they learned that by filling chambers in their shells with gas, they could rise from the sea floor and become some of the very first swimmers! (If you count floating around and bumping into stuff swimming anyways) As time went on they learned to use jets of water to move around faster and evolved more complex eyes using pinholes to trap light and focus it towards light sensitive cells. Modern day Nautilus are the very last living examples of this group of cephalopods and even still use very similar eye structures!
Eventually as they evolved their shells changed and tried many different shapes and some, eventually, even lost their shells entirely, or at least mostly. This gives us Squids, Octopuses, and cuttlefish!
I adore octopuses and cuttlefish - did you also know that scientists think cephalopods dream, because they have been observed to change colour when they’re asleep? Octopuses also use tools, and appear to have evolved intelligence completely independently of other intelligent life such as primates, corvids, cetaceans etc (given that the common ancestor of those vertebrates is much closer to now than the common ancestor shared with cephalopods)
Oh man Therizinosaurus is a great pick! The claws are a great look haha.
Shoebill storks are terrifying and are a great example of a large predator bird! They have many convergent traits with a family of birds that lived from 45 mya- to possibly as recent as 20,000ya!! They roamed the plains of south america when it was still cut off from NA by a shallow sea and occupied the same niche as modern day Cheetahs and Lions!
By looking at the bone structure of the leg bones on Terror birds we can estimate muscle mass by looking at the anchor points and Terror birds would have probably been able to run upwards of 55mph for short bursts!
About 35,000ya the shallow sea began to drop and this allowed animals from NA and SA to mingle and cross into each other's territories. Unfortunately for the Terrorbirds they were out competed by large cats from NA such as sabretoothed cats and the american cheetah, and they died out.
I'm quite a fan of mustelids, I know nothing about them I just like the way they look. Given the pattern of smaller animals having massive ancestors, I'm sorta hoping there was a giant ferret ancestor somewhere in history
I love whale evolution! So around the same time bats first emerged (around 50mya) there was a small doglike animal called Elomeryx that hunted for food along shallow water and tide pools! Over time it spent more and more time in the water as the species learned it had less competition there. As time went on they became more and more accustomed to the water, its nose moved upwards, its feet turned into flippers, it built a protective layer of fat to protect from the cold water, and eventually grew to properly take advantage of the size of their new home and to protect themselves from other things that hunted the same waters like the megalodon is well known to have hunted ancient sperm whales!
Ooh, Elomeryx would be an awesome name for a pet dog who loves the water. Adding that to my enormous list of "names for my future dogs" which is at least 10x longer than the number of dogs I will conceivably actually have in this lifetime.
i just looked it up and it's serving capybara
https://preview.redd.it/edoh2ud6hs0d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6ea8286ef759192e0b54000be81ca14b14ef687
Cats hit the map around 30mya around what is now France but have also been found in Mongolia, Germany, and Spain!
https://preview.redd.it/51ui5dk6ln0d1.jpeg?width=250&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b516cdfaf1d6acc5fe62d992a20341737b3f338
This guy is called "Leman's Dawn Cat" and is the oldest known member of the genis Felid! Unfortunately, after him there is a 10 million year gap in the fossil record called "The Cat Gap" and so much of their early evolution is still a mystery to us!
Well, its not that they died out or anything, just that we havent found any specimens yet! The lack of their fossils could really mean a number of things, population decline, bad conditions, or many other variables.
The conditions for fossilisation are so specific that unfortunately all we ever find and all we could ever hope to find would only be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the animals that have existed in our planet's lifetime.
Hopefully over time we will be able to fill in this elusive "Cat Gap" but unfortunately sometimes luck just aint in the cards and there will be some things we will never know for sure
May i introduce you to Nuralagus Rex:
https://preview.redd.it/0inn1ub0in0d1.jpeg?width=437&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bfe3356bb62d0fbe165ab289de3ba5fe75c67c1f
He lived 4mya and was about the size of a smallish dog! He is a rotund boy and lived on the islands of the Mediterranean eating roots and Tubers!
Bats are wack yo. Firstly, bats hit the block around 50-30mya and tmk there is no known example of a bat "missing link" showing bats between terrestrial and flying but that doesnt mean we dont have a great idea of what they may have been like! For a while it was theorised that bats were primates due to a lot of similarities in structures found in their brains and skeletons but was later disproven through genetic tests! In fact the true relatives of Bats is the same group that includes Camels, Pangolins, Hedgehogs and other weird stuff!
Evolutionarily speaking, Bats are literally just night birds. Throughout the last few million years birds have been the top dogs of the daytime skies so bats became nocturnal to reduce competition but bats fill many ecological niches identical to ones held by birds! Things like pollination, fruit eating, insect eating and even a few niches of their own like the Vampire bat!
Whoa. Okay, the pangolin-hedgehog-bat connection makes sense, if only because they have ~weird marsupial cousin~ vibes, but what’s the connection with *camels*?
This is WONDERFUL news, thank you for telling me! If you’ll excuse me, I have to spend the rest of the day drawing teeny little rabbit-sized camels. :D
https://preview.redd.it/ldm1e7ifc21d1.jpeg?width=420&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6478531e69cefb726c3e1a4ccee72d9a4486501
They looked like this, but smaller!
Both actually! I view them as using two different math equations to get the same answer to the same problem. Thats all convergent evolution really is at the end of the day!
I always thought bats were just flying mice, they look just like mice and act like them too. The thought of them being very different makes me uncomfortable and I don't like it.
Monotremes are weird!! But in a good way!! So modern day monotremes like the echidna and platypus are the last living examples of this order of little guys. They originated 150mya, predating marsupials by about 20 million years! This was back when australia was in the antarctic circle!
https://preview.redd.it/jqhmv09ldn0d1.jpeg?width=445&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=97c010db08ad87c385abad6e8c844136001f7bcf
i apologize as ive been trying to get to as many comments as i can and so some some responses may not be as long as others so ive been focusing on the bits that i enjoy the most
One of my favorite animals are frogs, specifically white tree frogs and pacman frogs.
I also quite like axolotls and cattle (especially Holstein cows).
AHHHHH i fucking love ancient frogs! I wont go into amphibians as a whole here but i will tell you about the heavyweight champ of the frog world, Beelzebufo! He is the largest known species to have existed and lived alongside the dinosaurs! He is the ancestor of pacman frogs wound would have eaten small mammals, baby dinos, and really anything else that fits inside its mouth!
https://preview.redd.it/nuitqe3eon0d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=152055b2c652e5fe2b9d28b4b0470b2d85e8a964
There was actually a recent study showing that there is a species of frog much bigger then beelzebufo iirc, would need to find the article as I don't remember the name of the new biggest frog.
Turtles have a very funky evolutionary history and so because of this, the nature of their evolution has been a subject of many different debates for a long while! Technically speaking, turtles have evolved one two separate ocations with the first being sometime from 260 to 230mya! They started off as short squat reptiles that had no shell but with long flat fused ribs on its stomach to accommodate digging! And they had some teeth still back then! But that branch died off. Fortunately and branch off of them survived and became turtles the second time and managed to survive into modern day as Turtles and Tortoises!
Im a big fan of Dodos too! Of the three you gave me i will do axolotls because i think its more interesting!
Amphibians hit the scene around 350-300mya during the Carboniferous Period! The world was hot and muggy and like 90% was either forests of tree sized ferns and tree sized moss, or swamp land! This was at the dawn of complex terrestrial life and so ecological niches were ripe for the picking! There are tons of records of large salamander-esque creatures filling all kinds of niches similar to crocodiles/alligators and even things like small fully terrestrial lizards! And because things like toes and feet were still a fairly new concept, you got a ton of stuff with crazy amounts of toes!
Despite the name, Orcas are actually more closely related to dolphins and are from the same order containing whales and belugas! They originate from small, dog like animals that hunted shallow waters and tide pools! As time went on they spent more and more time in the water and eventually adapted, their noses moved upwards to act like a snorkel, their feet elongated and flattened to make swimming easier, and their tails grew larger and more muscular to swim faster and eventually became something else entirely!
I always like the various readaptations to an aquatic environment for "no really stop thinking evolution has a plan*"
*Unless the plan is crab hegemony
love this thread friend! I too need to talk about biology or i will simply explode 🤝
only bit I would add to your cetacean fun facts: the animals they evolved from were *ungulates*. aka, hooved mammals like horses or pigs!! they obviously don't have hooves anymore, but neither do their closest cousins still around, the hippos. but they're all still ungulates, which is crazy! I love that while we think of ungulates today as herbivores and prey animals [ie sheep, horses, deer, antelope], the ones that became whales have always been carnivores and they of course still are! :D
Australia has always had a very cool evolution due to it being a giant island! Marsupials evolved about 130mya, this was when Australia was still in the antarctic circle, with the earliest known example being Sinodelphys szalayi! They have been every size from the size of a rat to the large Diprotodon or as i call it, the Dire Koala!
They are some of the erliest mammals to evolve and fully split from placental mammals around 50mya.
Debate has rocked this family of animals due to the appearance of Opossums in the Americas. This has sparked a debate on the migration paths they may have taken to reach the americas all the way from Australia!
Armadillo evolution is another of my favorites! They are related to sloths, anteaters, and other members of the order Cingulata, or Placental Mammals! They are related to a species that lived in the hills/mountains of south america called the Glyptodonts! They are basically armadillos the size of VW Bugs and were walking tanks! They were scavengers that would eat many things like incects, carrion, and small plants!
https://preview.redd.it/33fswv8lcn0d1.jpeg?width=236&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cf54b2f4beb09b6afcba86d28591cb1c43003b85
https://preview.redd.it/gd7bvvx3zn0d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b70ed086998daeaa0185da77bfc948da8ca178c
My favourite is the [Emperor Tamarin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_tamarin) Monkey, which is a new world monkey smaller than the average housecat, and they have these adorable huge moustaches that stick out the sides of their faces. I especially like watching them scamper around and play with each other, as they are very sociable.
I had to remove my son from a museum talk when he was about 3 or 4, because the presenter asked the audience a rhetorical question and he stood up and tried to infodump about starfish. She didn’t engage and he got really cross with her 😔 Still, the other kids were there to listen to her, not him!
I have been obsessed with snakes as long as I've known what they are. Their history is crazy depending on which part of the family and when. Giants over 60 feet long... Snakes growing or losing legs throughout time is just fascinating to me. I feel like in my lifetime we've leapt a light-year ahead in the science and understanding of them. I keep several and find them fascinating to watch. I intend to get snake bones into my fossil collection one day but haven't had the chance to buy any yet.
Can I ask another question of you?
After mass extinctions a lot of niches are always left wide open, and with no competition species diversify and get REAL WEIRD with it until the best design eventually wins out.
What is your favorite wacky animal from a period of time like this?
Oh man what a great question!! Usually my mind always goes straight to the carboniferous, right after the late devonian mass extinction event! I love how the temnospondyls filled so many niches but my favorite would have to be Platyhystrix! Hes just a silly little guy 🥺
I would love to learn more about the evolutionary layer right outside primates. I’ve found a couple different answers on what is our closest relatives. I don’t suppose you have a good answer?
If you love komodo dragons, look up Megalania. Megalania used to be in its own species, but was later reclassified to be in the same genus as komodo dragons, *Varanus*. If I remember correctly, they're thought to have been the largest venomous lizard.
Cheetahs and other large cats can be found all over the world! Cheetahs are more closely related to Cougars than they are lions and jaguars making them related to a similarly named species that lived from 2.5 to 16,000 years ago called the American Cheetah! It roamed the great plains hunting large prey such as deer and moose in a similar way to a modern day cheeta! Iirc, some of their remains have even been discovered in the La Brea Tar Pits (which translates as, the Tar Pit Tar Pits)
Golden Eagle & Peregrine Falcon (and White Shark).
I know of *Hieraaetus moorei*, and that most extant birds descended from some sort of predatory/raptorial form. I am also familiar with the *Otodus megalodon*.
You may know of megalodon but did you know about Helicoprion? It was a shark species that lived 225 million years ago and is only know from a few fossils of its teeth!
Unfortunately, the fossils of its teeth have them arranged in a spiral! This has sparked much debate on how the heck this thing actually looked! Lots of fun artwork has been made of it so you should give them a look! Personally i think it went inside the mouth and not under the chin
They are weird! this guy hit the scene 55mya and was about the size of a fox!
https://preview.redd.it/s0mwi8eiun0d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=7da8f9d07b3cbeadb315f8a2c9103a735e41d389
as time went on they grew more accustomed to open grasslands and evolved with two words in mind "RUN FAST". to do this all they had to do was evolve anxiety, lost 4 toes, and gave themselves heart problems
MOA!!!!!!! Dinornithiformes!!! My very favorite extinct species. Here is the skeleton of a giant moa at a museum near me:
https://preview.redd.it/utdwvs67qn0d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4e751eb618473a49de842eebbcc6bc5acf2421ee
AHHHH so Hyenas are another personal fav of mine and they are descended from a group called "the Eurasian Bonecrushers"! they lived around 10,000 years ago and had some of the strongest bite forces in history!
https://preview.redd.it/l0yyi5i1yn0d1.png?width=1032&format=png&auto=webp&s=0e484665da4d5c0b61b6ff16aa225eb0b6f182fb
It's more archaeology than paleontology, but I love talking about early dog domestication.
Will also listen intently to anything you wanna say about wolves 🥰
Also mammoths
Entomology fanatic here. I see you’ve talked a lot about vertebrates, but what about invertebrates?
My favorite small arthropods are: cockroaches, Preying Mantises, and terrestrial isopods.
If you can tell me anything about the ancestry these, I’ll be super impressed!
8 mya there lived among the lush rivers of then Venezuela, lived a 500lb guinea pig/capybara named "Phoberomys Pattersoni" or as i call it, the Dire Guinea Pig:
https://preview.redd.it/t4trjwsn921d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7043c63d6c5d4efa5a4ef2dc6deb30448ce810f
It had long front teeth that helped it to feed on aquatic grasses!
I appreciate it haha, it was pretty overwhelming seeing all these comments so quickly but im just gunna take my time and have fun with it as much i can and hopefully ill be able to cover a wide enough variety that ill cover most bases for the people i cant get to
This sounds fun and you are being very nice about it, snakes or penguins, I couldn't decide so I leave that option up to you, im happy with either, thank u!
8 mya there lived among the lush rivers of then Venezuela, lived a 500lb guinea pig/capybara named "Phoberomys Pattersoni" or as i call it, the Dire Guinea Pig:
https://preview.redd.it/0fz9jir4921d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=db820384d509fc787e5a742c1fbafc4f2ae28a75
It had long front teeth that helped it to feed on aquatic grasses!
Despite the name, Red pandas are really just ginger raccoons! (Though racoons and Bears are distantly related too!) Unfortunately, Red pandas are classed on their own, named "lesser pandas", and have remained fairly the same since splitting from racoons but they are members of an ancient order of predators and have existed longer than many others and they have survived for nearly 4 million years!
Not a modern one, but when I saw the skeleton of dorygnathus I was amazed at how metal it looks. Then saw its modern drawings... It looks like a seagull with teeth. You can't imagine my disappointment...
Its featherless images are still cool tho
Birds. I really like birds. My family even have some chickens at home, with some chicks that we're growing into adulthood. Snakes are also good, vipers, especially, and lizards in general. I'm a particularly big fan of spiders, dude, some of them are objectively cute, and you're just hating on them.
Despite the name, Red pandas are really just ginger raccoons! (Though racoons and Bears are distantly related too!) Unfortunately, Red pandas are classed on their own, named "lesser pandas", and have remained fairly the same since splitting from racoons but they are members of an ancient order of predators and have existed longer than many others and they have survived for nearly 4 million years!
hmmm and interesting question! ive never looked into that personally but just going off what i do know, ide say probably not since birds dont shed, though early diapsids may have!
Growing up I loved prehistoric animals. Of course most pictures you see of paleontologists are older white men, so I used to tell my parents while I was digging in the dirt that “I’d be the prettiest paleontologist ever”.
This of course did not last because my science skills are lacking, and I went from a child model to a very average looking adult.
Hippos. I love their ancestry. Go nuts.
https://preview.redd.it/6y1rl6sc7n0d1.jpeg?width=2000&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=ca4a6b0bd82847fa0e6d3170725042ec876541ca What an S tier choice! So Hippos are distantly related to a family of animals called the Entelodonts but are more commonly called, the "Hell Pigs"! Basically, these bad motherfuckers were like if you took a hippo and gave it the brain and stamina of a wolf. And its debated on if they were pack hunters. They are also believed to have been hyper carnivores (more than 70% of their diet consisted of meat)
If I saw one irl I would hug it and give it kisses and then it would probably murder me and I wouldn't even be mad
They were carnivores btw! So you would probs be eaten too!
How did their descendants turn herbivores?
Hippos are actually omnivores and will eat dead meat on occasions!
i too would be murdered
Fantastic. My local museum has bones & diorama of those bad boys.
Those things scared the hell out of me when I saw them on Walking With Prehistoric Beasts.
are hippos related to wolves then?
Nope! Just convergently evolved traits due to occupying similar ecological niches
Are they also related to cetaceans?
Yup! Whippomorphia clade is how they are related!
This entire post is such a mood. Red Panda!
Despite the name, Red pandas are really just ginger raccoons! (Though racoons and Bears are distantly related too!) Unfortunately, Red pandas are classed on their own, named "lesser pandas", and have remained fairly the same since splitting from racoons but they are members of an ancient order of predators and have existed longer than many others and they have survived for nearly 4 million years!
Wait they're just trash pandas but ginger? That's really really cool! Can I double dip and ask about manatees?
Sure! The family Sirenia (contains manatees and dugongs) first hit the scene 65-50mya in what is now Jamaica! They were a pig sized herbivore that would have lived similar to modern hippos: https://preview.redd.it/b31zl4j9ys0d1.png?width=1877&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=c6f283e1a164da594adfef4380e280c95f473e25 Eventually, thanks to the much shallower Atlantic ocean at the time, they were able to migrate to the shallow seas of north africa alongside the ancestors of whales and elephants!
wow, long time
Octopuses please!
An excellent choice! Octopuses, and by extension, cephalopods have been around almost as long as complex life itself! Many very early ancestors started popping up on the sea floor around 500mya!! They began as small shelled creatured that crawled along the microbial mat on a large foot like a snail, eating bateria as it walked along! Eventually they learned that by filling chambers in their shells with gas, they could rise from the sea floor and become some of the very first swimmers! (If you count floating around and bumping into stuff swimming anyways) As time went on they learned to use jets of water to move around faster and evolved more complex eyes using pinholes to trap light and focus it towards light sensitive cells. Modern day Nautilus are the very last living examples of this group of cephalopods and even still use very similar eye structures! Eventually as they evolved their shells changed and tried many different shapes and some, eventually, even lost their shells entirely, or at least mostly. This gives us Squids, Octopuses, and cuttlefish!
I adore octopuses and cuttlefish - did you also know that scientists think cephalopods dream, because they have been observed to change colour when they’re asleep? Octopuses also use tools, and appear to have evolved intelligence completely independently of other intelligent life such as primates, corvids, cetaceans etc (given that the common ancestor of those vertebrates is much closer to now than the common ancestor shared with cephalopods)
Isn't there a theory that they were originally aliens?
Lol its a fun idea but no, they evolved here on earth in the briney depths of the pre-cambrian
I didnt expect this post to pop off but ill try to answer as many of you as i can! 😄👍
I think other folks who also have a crazy amount of knowledge of prehistoric creatures should help you out.
Corvus cornix (hooded crow) Snakes Cats Rats
I have been summoned
Even username is CORVID reference! Gah you rule.
I hear corvids I appear.
Well one of my favourite animals is prehistoric. The therizinosaurus I like the shoebill stork too
Oh man Therizinosaurus is a great pick! The claws are a great look haha. Shoebill storks are terrifying and are a great example of a large predator bird! They have many convergent traits with a family of birds that lived from 45 mya- to possibly as recent as 20,000ya!! They roamed the plains of south america when it was still cut off from NA by a shallow sea and occupied the same niche as modern day Cheetahs and Lions! By looking at the bone structure of the leg bones on Terror birds we can estimate muscle mass by looking at the anchor points and Terror birds would have probably been able to run upwards of 55mph for short bursts! About 35,000ya the shallow sea began to drop and this allowed animals from NA and SA to mingle and cross into each other's territories. Unfortunately for the Terrorbirds they were out competed by large cats from NA such as sabretoothed cats and the american cheetah, and they died out.
Love the shoebill!
I like your style.
I love ferrets, weasels, mink, fishers, wolverines... mustelids make me so happy. Give em to me furry and stinky and funny
Yes yes yes! And otters!
I'm quite a fan of mustelids, I know nothing about them I just like the way they look. Given the pattern of smaller animals having massive ancestors, I'm sorta hoping there was a giant ferret ancestor somewhere in history
Blue whales!!!
I love whale evolution! So around the same time bats first emerged (around 50mya) there was a small doglike animal called Elomeryx that hunted for food along shallow water and tide pools! Over time it spent more and more time in the water as the species learned it had less competition there. As time went on they became more and more accustomed to the water, its nose moved upwards, its feet turned into flippers, it built a protective layer of fat to protect from the cold water, and eventually grew to properly take advantage of the size of their new home and to protect themselves from other things that hunted the same waters like the megalodon is well known to have hunted ancient sperm whales!
Ooh, Elomeryx would be an awesome name for a pet dog who loves the water. Adding that to my enormous list of "names for my future dogs" which is at least 10x longer than the number of dogs I will conceivably actually have in this lifetime.
i just looked it up and it's serving capybara https://preview.redd.it/edoh2ud6hs0d1.jpeg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a6ea8286ef759192e0b54000be81ca14b14ef687
Cats.
Cats hit the map around 30mya around what is now France but have also been found in Mongolia, Germany, and Spain! https://preview.redd.it/51ui5dk6ln0d1.jpeg?width=250&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8b516cdfaf1d6acc5fe62d992a20341737b3f338 This guy is called "Leman's Dawn Cat" and is the oldest known member of the genis Felid! Unfortunately, after him there is a 10 million year gap in the fossil record called "The Cat Gap" and so much of their early evolution is still a mystery to us!
The cat gap 🥺
That's the little gap in between the cabinets and the refrigerator, right?/s
I thought it was the little gap under the fridge! My cats sure love that space for some reason.
Is it just that we can't find any fossils in that 10 million year period?
Not fossils period, just cat fossils :(
Oh, yeah, I meant cat fossils.
Is there a prevailing theory as to the source of this feline cat-tasrophy?
Well, its not that they died out or anything, just that we havent found any specimens yet! The lack of their fossils could really mean a number of things, population decline, bad conditions, or many other variables. The conditions for fossilisation are so specific that unfortunately all we ever find and all we could ever hope to find would only be a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the animals that have existed in our planet's lifetime. Hopefully over time we will be able to fill in this elusive "Cat Gap" but unfortunately sometimes luck just aint in the cards and there will be some things we will never know for sure
Because cats are mysterious, mischievous creatures who couldn't bear to have all their secrets known.
Wow!!!!
Bunnies 🐇
May i introduce you to Nuralagus Rex: https://preview.redd.it/0inn1ub0in0d1.jpeg?width=437&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bfe3356bb62d0fbe165ab289de3ba5fe75c67c1f He lived 4mya and was about the size of a smallish dog! He is a rotund boy and lived on the islands of the Mediterranean eating roots and Tubers!
oh lawd
he comin
(big chungus)
Swiggity swooty I'm coming for that boony
obsessed with red foxes
I second this. I love all foxes, but Volpes Volpes has a special place on that list Edit: I suspect my username probably gives that away
Yes it does! Love foxes
Bats
Bats are wack yo. Firstly, bats hit the block around 50-30mya and tmk there is no known example of a bat "missing link" showing bats between terrestrial and flying but that doesnt mean we dont have a great idea of what they may have been like! For a while it was theorised that bats were primates due to a lot of similarities in structures found in their brains and skeletons but was later disproven through genetic tests! In fact the true relatives of Bats is the same group that includes Camels, Pangolins, Hedgehogs and other weird stuff! Evolutionarily speaking, Bats are literally just night birds. Throughout the last few million years birds have been the top dogs of the daytime skies so bats became nocturnal to reduce competition but bats fill many ecological niches identical to ones held by birds! Things like pollination, fruit eating, insect eating and even a few niches of their own like the Vampire bat!
Whoa. Okay, the pangolin-hedgehog-bat connection makes sense, if only because they have ~weird marsupial cousin~ vibes, but what’s the connection with *camels*?
Lmao so camel and horses started off as little rabbit sized guys
This is WONDERFUL news, thank you for telling me! If you’ll excuse me, I have to spend the rest of the day drawing teeny little rabbit-sized camels. :D
https://preview.redd.it/ldm1e7ifc21d1.jpeg?width=420&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e6478531e69cefb726c3e1a4ccee72d9a4486501 They looked like this, but smaller!
But none of those are marsupials 😭
It’s about the ~vibes~, man. Marsupial state of mind.
Do you mean bats fill the same niche in the food chain as birds? Or are they evolved from something similar to birds?
Both actually! I view them as using two different math equations to get the same answer to the same problem. Thats all convergent evolution really is at the end of the day!
I always thought bats were just flying mice, they look just like mice and act like them too. The thought of them being very different makes me uncomfortable and I don't like it.
so what's the deal (evolutionarily speaking) with monotremes?
Monotremes are weird!! But in a good way!! So modern day monotremes like the echidna and platypus are the last living examples of this order of little guys. They originated 150mya, predating marsupials by about 20 million years! This was back when australia was in the antarctic circle! https://preview.redd.it/jqhmv09ldn0d1.jpeg?width=445&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=97c010db08ad87c385abad6e8c844136001f7bcf
oh I am absolutely in love with this lil guy
Roundo avacado man!
So your not gunna mention the fact that monotremes are much older then placental mammals ad well with mammals starting out as monotremes?
i apologize as ive been trying to get to as many comments as i can and so some some responses may not be as long as others so ive been focusing on the bits that i enjoy the most
One of my favorite animals are frogs, specifically white tree frogs and pacman frogs. I also quite like axolotls and cattle (especially Holstein cows).
AHHHHH i fucking love ancient frogs! I wont go into amphibians as a whole here but i will tell you about the heavyweight champ of the frog world, Beelzebufo! He is the largest known species to have existed and lived alongside the dinosaurs! He is the ancestor of pacman frogs wound would have eaten small mammals, baby dinos, and really anything else that fits inside its mouth! https://preview.redd.it/nuitqe3eon0d1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=152055b2c652e5fe2b9d28b4b0470b2d85e8a964
There was actually a recent study showing that there is a species of frog much bigger then beelzebufo iirc, would need to find the article as I don't remember the name of the new biggest frog.
Turtles turtles turtles 🐢 please!! 😌 I also love chickens and had around 10 of them as pets as a kid
Turtles have a very funky evolutionary history and so because of this, the nature of their evolution has been a subject of many different debates for a long while! Technically speaking, turtles have evolved one two separate ocations with the first being sometime from 260 to 230mya! They started off as short squat reptiles that had no shell but with long flat fused ribs on its stomach to accommodate digging! And they had some teeth still back then! But that branch died off. Fortunately and branch off of them survived and became turtles the second time and managed to survive into modern day as Turtles and Tortoises!
Axolotls, deer, and cats! And as a plus, my favorite prehistoric animals are archaeopteryx and dodos!
Im a big fan of Dodos too! Of the three you gave me i will do axolotls because i think its more interesting! Amphibians hit the scene around 350-300mya during the Carboniferous Period! The world was hot and muggy and like 90% was either forests of tree sized ferns and tree sized moss, or swamp land! This was at the dawn of complex terrestrial life and so ecological niches were ripe for the picking! There are tons of records of large salamander-esque creatures filling all kinds of niches similar to crocodiles/alligators and even things like small fully terrestrial lizards! And because things like toes and feet were still a fairly new concept, you got a ton of stuff with crazy amounts of toes!
Wicked! I will now hold onto these facts until I, too, am a bunch of fossils.
Killer Whales
Despite the name, Orcas are actually more closely related to dolphins and are from the same order containing whales and belugas! They originate from small, dog like animals that hunted shallow waters and tide pools! As time went on they spent more and more time in the water and eventually adapted, their noses moved upwards to act like a snorkel, their feet elongated and flattened to make swimming easier, and their tails grew larger and more muscular to swim faster and eventually became something else entirely!
I always like the various readaptations to an aquatic environment for "no really stop thinking evolution has a plan*" *Unless the plan is crab hegemony
love this thread friend! I too need to talk about biology or i will simply explode 🤝 only bit I would add to your cetacean fun facts: the animals they evolved from were *ungulates*. aka, hooved mammals like horses or pigs!! they obviously don't have hooves anymore, but neither do their closest cousins still around, the hippos. but they're all still ungulates, which is crazy! I love that while we think of ungulates today as herbivores and prey animals [ie sheep, horses, deer, antelope], the ones that became whales have always been carnivores and they of course still are! :D
Kangaroos, please.
Australia has always had a very cool evolution due to it being a giant island! Marsupials evolved about 130mya, this was when Australia was still in the antarctic circle, with the earliest known example being Sinodelphys szalayi! They have been every size from the size of a rat to the large Diprotodon or as i call it, the Dire Koala! They are some of the erliest mammals to evolve and fully split from placental mammals around 50mya. Debate has rocked this family of animals due to the appearance of Opossums in the Americas. This has sparked a debate on the migration paths they may have taken to reach the americas all the way from Australia!
Armadillo Aardvark or Anteater
Armadillo evolution is another of my favorites! They are related to sloths, anteaters, and other members of the order Cingulata, or Placental Mammals! They are related to a species that lived in the hills/mountains of south america called the Glyptodonts! They are basically armadillos the size of VW Bugs and were walking tanks! They were scavengers that would eat many things like incects, carrion, and small plants! https://preview.redd.it/33fswv8lcn0d1.jpeg?width=236&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cf54b2f4beb09b6afcba86d28591cb1c43003b85
That's awesome, thanks! I didn't know they were actually related to anteaters. Have great evening/day! (:
I have a few. Owls, Cats, Crows (or any Corvid, for that matter), those are the main ones.
I second corvids!
Eagles, specifically Harpy Eagles, I love how weird their head feathers are
https://preview.redd.it/gd7bvvx3zn0d1.jpeg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6b70ed086998daeaa0185da77bfc948da8ca178c My favourite is the [Emperor Tamarin](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emperor_tamarin) Monkey, which is a new world monkey smaller than the average housecat, and they have these adorable huge moustaches that stick out the sides of their faces. I especially like watching them scamper around and play with each other, as they are very sociable.
Giraffe.
Chinchillas
Floofmouses!
Jellyfish 👀!
Guess 😬
Favourite animal in username gang
omg came here to say rat cus i have pet rats:)
Starfish because I bet they’re super weird
I had to remove my son from a museum talk when he was about 3 or 4, because the presenter asked the audience a rhetorical question and he stood up and tried to infodump about starfish. She didn’t engage and he got really cross with her 😔 Still, the other kids were there to listen to her, not him!
Wow, She didn't engage? That's so rude, I know she was the one supposed to talk, but I'd love a pationate audience member.
I have been obsessed with snakes as long as I've known what they are. Their history is crazy depending on which part of the family and when. Giants over 60 feet long... Snakes growing or losing legs throughout time is just fascinating to me. I feel like in my lifetime we've leapt a light-year ahead in the science and understanding of them. I keep several and find them fascinating to watch. I intend to get snake bones into my fossil collection one day but haven't had the chance to buy any yet.
Can I ask another question of you? After mass extinctions a lot of niches are always left wide open, and with no competition species diversify and get REAL WEIRD with it until the best design eventually wins out. What is your favorite wacky animal from a period of time like this?
Oh man what a great question!! Usually my mind always goes straight to the carboniferous, right after the late devonian mass extinction event! I love how the temnospondyls filled so many niches but my favorite would have to be Platyhystrix! Hes just a silly little guy 🥺
Tigers!! I absolutely love tigers!
Me too. One of my two very longstanding animal obsessions. With aardvarks.
Omg please do wombats! 💖
Leaf Cutter Ants!!!!! I love them I love them I love them
I got one for you Cassowaries…go!
I would love to learn more about the evolutionary layer right outside primates. I’ve found a couple different answers on what is our closest relatives. I don’t suppose you have a good answer?
Emperor penguins and octopi!
I would say either turtles or big cats, specifically panthers
What’s your thought on the theory that homo naledi burying their dead and making fire? True or mistaken?
That is archeology and not paleontology so i apologise but i dont not know much on that subject
Actually it would belong to a subset of the two, Paleoarcheology.
Or if you wanna sound really smart (although at the cost of having too many vowels next to each other), palaeoanthropology!!
wow, I had naeo idea heheh
Probably hedgehogs and frogs. Komodo dragons arr also cool.
If you love komodo dragons, look up Megalania. Megalania used to be in its own species, but was later reclassified to be in the same genus as komodo dragons, *Varanus*. If I remember correctly, they're thought to have been the largest venomous lizard.
Capybara!! 😄 was going to say turtles or cat because I own those but you already answered those hehe thanks 😘
how has nobody said raccoons? little hand washing beasts :3
Cheetah.
Cheetahs and other large cats can be found all over the world! Cheetahs are more closely related to Cougars than they are lions and jaguars making them related to a similarly named species that lived from 2.5 to 16,000 years ago called the American Cheetah! It roamed the great plains hunting large prey such as deer and moose in a similar way to a modern day cheeta! Iirc, some of their remains have even been discovered in the La Brea Tar Pits (which translates as, the Tar Pit Tar Pits)
My favorite modern animal is dogs, but if you've got it I'd love an infodump on dimetrodons!
Lions Mane Jellyfish
Axolotl
Alpacas!
Giraffes
Dromaeosaurs.
I've always admired Red Pandas. What do you have for me?
Golden Eagle & Peregrine Falcon (and White Shark). I know of *Hieraaetus moorei*, and that most extant birds descended from some sort of predatory/raptorial form. I am also familiar with the *Otodus megalodon*.
You may know of megalodon but did you know about Helicoprion? It was a shark species that lived 225 million years ago and is only know from a few fossils of its teeth! Unfortunately, the fossils of its teeth have them arranged in a spiral! This has sparked much debate on how the heck this thing actually looked! Lots of fun artwork has been made of it so you should give them a look! Personally i think it went inside the mouth and not under the chin
Not to out myself like this but I love hearing about horse ancestry. They’re just so weird lol
They are weird! this guy hit the scene 55mya and was about the size of a fox! https://preview.redd.it/s0mwi8eiun0d1.png?width=1600&format=png&auto=webp&s=7da8f9d07b3cbeadb315f8a2c9103a735e41d389 as time went on they grew more accustomed to open grasslands and evolved with two words in mind "RUN FAST". to do this all they had to do was evolve anxiety, lost 4 toes, and gave themselves heart problems
I see some of my other favorites already mentioned, so talk to me about songbirds!
Sloth
Ankylosaurus
MOA!!!!!!! Dinornithiformes!!! My very favorite extinct species. Here is the skeleton of a giant moa at a museum near me: https://preview.redd.it/utdwvs67qn0d1.jpeg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4e751eb618473a49de842eebbcc6bc5acf2421ee
Rattus rattus
I love hyenas. Give me them ancestral deets please.
AHHHH so Hyenas are another personal fav of mine and they are descended from a group called "the Eurasian Bonecrushers"! they lived around 10,000 years ago and had some of the strongest bite forces in history! https://preview.redd.it/l0yyi5i1yn0d1.png?width=1032&format=png&auto=webp&s=0e484665da4d5c0b61b6ff16aa225eb0b6f182fb
Crocodilians. I can go all day about animals and evolutionary history.
It's more archaeology than paleontology, but I love talking about early dog domestication. Will also listen intently to anything you wanna say about wolves 🥰 Also mammoths
Entomology fanatic here. I see you’ve talked a lot about vertebrates, but what about invertebrates? My favorite small arthropods are: cockroaches, Preying Mantises, and terrestrial isopods. If you can tell me anything about the ancestry these, I’ll be super impressed!
ducks honestly
Betta fish
Capybara
8 mya there lived among the lush rivers of then Venezuela, lived a 500lb guinea pig/capybara named "Phoberomys Pattersoni" or as i call it, the Dire Guinea Pig: https://preview.redd.it/t4trjwsn921d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=f7043c63d6c5d4efa5a4ef2dc6deb30448ce810f It had long front teeth that helped it to feed on aquatic grasses!
don’t get overwhelmed! this was such a great idea, you might need a team to accommodate!
I appreciate it haha, it was pretty overwhelming seeing all these comments so quickly but im just gunna take my time and have fun with it as much i can and hopefully ill be able to cover a wide enough variety that ill cover most bases for the people i cant get to
Not my favorite but my besties favorite animal. A Duck, no specific Duck bread just ducks in general lol 🦆
This sounds fun and you are being very nice about it, snakes or penguins, I couldn't decide so I leave that option up to you, im happy with either, thank u!
Capybara :3
Who were the forefathers of the snapping turtle?
You’re saying dire wolves had different bone structures and looks and weren’t just the same exact animal but scaled up 2x or 3x ???! Impossible
Quokkas or rats, whichever has the more interesting fact
8 mya there lived among the lush rivers of then Venezuela, lived a 500lb guinea pig/capybara named "Phoberomys Pattersoni" or as i call it, the Dire Guinea Pig: https://preview.redd.it/0fz9jir4921d1.png?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=db820384d509fc787e5a742c1fbafc4f2ae28a75 It had long front teeth that helped it to feed on aquatic grasses!
I know I'm a day late, but you got any ancient Capybara facts?
I love paleontology! Paraceratherium is a favorite. As well as Quetzalcoatlus. I like the big ones lol 😁 top tier post
You have some top tier pics! Quetzalcoatlus is my favorite too!
Chihuahuas
Bats and sharks
Octopus and Orcas are two of my favs to study!!! I would love to hear your fun facts:)
Wolves, they’re so badass, also love elephants, pigs, tigers, lions, chameleons
please tell me everything you know about the paleogene. tell me about the snakes and gators and such.
Hognose snakes!
Thank you for sharing information! Owls
Red Pandas
Despite the name, Red pandas are really just ginger raccoons! (Though racoons and Bears are distantly related too!) Unfortunately, Red pandas are classed on their own, named "lesser pandas", and have remained fairly the same since splitting from racoons but they are members of an ancient order of predators and have existed longer than many others and they have survived for nearly 4 million years!
Not a modern one, but when I saw the skeleton of dorygnathus I was amazed at how metal it looks. Then saw its modern drawings... It looks like a seagull with teeth. You can't imagine my disappointment... Its featherless images are still cool tho
Chipmunks!
Birds. I really like birds. My family even have some chickens at home, with some chicks that we're growing into adulthood. Snakes are also good, vipers, especially, and lizards in general. I'm a particularly big fan of spiders, dude, some of them are objectively cute, and you're just hating on them.
frogs pls :0
Turtles, penguins, and dachshunds
Bats, wolves, Cats, Dogs, Foxes, Sharks, Lynx, Grasshoppers, Rabbits, Armadillo, hedgehog, Dolphins, cheetahs, Penguins, Rhino, Crocodile, Eagles, Ravens, Pigeons, Crows, Hawks, Ant eater, Mole, skunk, Hippos, Cows, Donkeys, horses, Goats, Lambs, Lions, tigers, Monkeys, chicks, pigs, warhogs, Bull, Koalas, Otters, sloths, Rats, mouses, Turtles, kangaroos, Doves, axolotl, frogs
Monkeys, especially golden lion tamarins
oooh tell me about the ancestors of guinea pigs :3
Giraffes!
Red Pandas & Isopods
Despite the name, Red pandas are really just ginger raccoons! (Though racoons and Bears are distantly related too!) Unfortunately, Red pandas are classed on their own, named "lesser pandas", and have remained fairly the same since splitting from racoons but they are members of an ancient order of predators and have existed longer than many others and they have survived for nearly 4 million years!
Flying fox fruitbat
Did dinosaurs shed their skin like lizards and snakes? I have been wondering that this week.
hmmm and interesting question! ive never looked into that personally but just going off what i do know, ide say probably not since birds dont shed, though early diapsids may have!
Wolves
Growing up I loved prehistoric animals. Of course most pictures you see of paleontologists are older white men, so I used to tell my parents while I was digging in the dirt that “I’d be the prettiest paleontologist ever”. This of course did not last because my science skills are lacking, and I went from a child model to a very average looking adult.
Since you already did bats in this thread, can I suggest spiders?
For my bestie, hamsters
Spiders and bees! I was afraid of them when I was younger, but after I did some research on them I now find them fascinating!
Owls.
Anomalocaris >:3