The Mission: To see the animals we never see.

Extinct animals are awesome.

That's the premise we're going with here. Living animals are fantastic too, but, we obviously are way more familiar with them than the extinct ones. Because I'm a nerd -- a nerd with two monitors -- I end up tooling around online looking up things about extinct animals, or watching documentaries, or reading reports on the latest findings. Sometimes my mind gets blown by finding out about some species of bizarre extinct animal I didn't previously know about.

I found myself wishing for a resource that would provide me with a one stop shop for cool animals that just weren't around any more. That's when I realized that, hey, I could do that.

And so, here we are.

What you can expect:

A) Cool extinct animals. Or at least, the ones I think are cool.

B) They won't just be dinosaurs and their decedents. Synapsids and their decedents need love too!

C) There probably won't be a lot of fish. Sorry, ichthyologists.

D) Or insects, etc. I'm sticking to tetrapoda.

E) These animals won't just be limited to ones that went extinct several million years ago or whatever. Recent extinctions have taken some really nifty animals from us too.

F) Some minimal discussion of evolution. It comes with the territory. I'll try to keep it to "Hesperornis were super nifty" most of the time.

G) We're going to stick with a conversational tone here. I can speak academese in the social sciences dialect. But I'm not here to address academia. I'm here to make sure the general public knows that our world was once populated by 8 foot long beavers.

As for my qualifications: There are startlingly few. I am not a paleontologist, archaeologist, or evolutionary biologist. I have had some training in psychology and anthropology, where I've had brief encounters with the evolutionary bits of both. I'm not even an ornithologist.

I'm a graduate student in sociology currently, which means I have Opinions on both evolutionary anthropology and psychology. I'll try not to let that seep in too much.

For those that are curious about this sort of thing, my story -- the one concerning why I like this stuff -- is that when I was 8 I wanted a pet dinosaur. I ended up having to settle for a pet cockatiel who I came to love and adore. I became fascinated with birds in general. Years down the line these fossils with feathers start cropping up, and it became increasingly obvious that birds were not only related to dinosaurs, they were not only evolved from dinosaurs, but that in all likelihood they were simply living manoraptoran theropods who had survived the K-T extinction event. I experienced a moment of jubilation as I realized that my childhood dreams of getting my hands on a dinosaur had been fulfilled, and that I'd actually been living with dinosaurs for years unawares*.

But by then it had become a hobby. So I kept up in my extraordinarily amateur way with the progress in the scientific literature on avian evolution and avian intelligence. When it comes to the later I occasionally delve into the actual journal articles when they crop up in a discipline I'm familiar with. Which at this point is basically only in psychology. This has lead to an inordinate amount of time spent reading about the evolution of birds, which has lead to an inordinate amount of time figuring out the evolution of mammals, which has lead to sitting at 3 A.M. watching documentaries about hyenadon on Netflix while I play videogames.

So, please, if you find this interesting take a deeper look into the literature than this. Email a professor of paleontology! Chat with an ornithologist! Delve into the mystical world of journal articles.

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* Look, I also know about the archosaur thing, and I think it's a load of bunk. The lines between birds and other maniraptors are so utterly blurry as to render the two groups inseperable. So, to reject birds as dinosaurs you must also reject maniraptors as dinosaurs -- which admittedly, a few people have done. From the evidence I've seen it seems like it's a huge stretch to place maniraptors outside of theropoda given the wide range of physiological similarities. I'll admit we don't have avian evolution 100% worked out, but, until some devastatingly compelling evidence arises maniraptora belongs in theropoda as far as I'm concerned.

But, by gar, don't take my word for it. Research it yourself!