Mesohippus

Attention Scientists: Do you want a swimming pool full of gold coins to Scrooge McDuck through? Enough bling that you can fund and found your own Mars colony? Perhaps you have the simple desire to build a fourteen bedroom treehouse wherenin all the rooms are connected by a series of ziplines.

Well then. Allow me to introduce you to Mesohippus, if you didn't already know them:

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

For those of you not in the loop, Mesohippus was a proto-horse that lived 30-40 million(ish) years ago. While most of the past was full of hillariously giant things, Mesohippus went the other direction and was comicly tiny -- it was about 2 feet tall and hadn't yet developed the single toed hoof we're so familiar with today. And, in the right hands, it could be a gold mine.

"But Tetra," the males among you inquire wryly, "How will I achieve enough money to build a full sized marble pyramid with tiny horses?" The females among my audience won't be asking this because they'll already be running to their laboratories at breakneck speeds having anticipated where I'm going with this. Hell, there might not even be any female scientists in the audience because they're already so busy at their cloning benches* having thought of this already.

They remember being a little girl you see. And if they weren't a little girl who was completely nuts about horses, then I assure you they knew at least twenty other little girls who were. This equine adoration has resulted in such industries as My Little Ponies, Breyer model horses**, websites such as Howrse and even the collectable card game Bella Sara. But more than pretend horses what these girls crave with a fervor is a real honest to god horse.

But horses are big, eat a lot, crap a lot, and more than a little expensive. Mesohippus fixes three out of four of those problems. All it would take is a few successful clonings and then a couple of generations of breeding for domestication, ala the silver foxes. Build (or in this case, replicate) a better horse and the screaming hordes of little girls will trample a path to your door.

Sources/Further Reading:

Wikipedia

About

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* Or whatever secret and most likely non-existant device it is they use to clone 30 million year old animals.

**To clarify the extent of this phenomena you must note there are model horse shows.

Lystrosaurus

Going through synapsids and early mammals is a little like showing up at a family reunion and finding out you're descended from a long line sasquatch, only, more humiliating. There's a reason we tend to focus on those that cropped up after the K-T extinction when we visually aproximate the past. Here. I'll let Lystrosaurus demonstrate:

Well, admittedly, it does look a little like your mom.

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

They're not quite a mammal -- they're a therapsid, a kind of synapsid. But the basic roots are there: one day these reject naked mole rats will evolve into the weasel looking things that one day evolve into primates that one day evolve into us. However, if you choose to reject the theory of evolution after reading that on the basis that there is no way in hell you're admitting being related to this thing then I completely understand. Or we could just claim we were adopted -- that a group of aliens left the intergalactic equivalent of a species in a basket on the doorstep of Earth.

All denials of a biological relationship aside, the weirdest thing about Lystrosaurus is that at one time they ruled the Earth. For some reason these things made it through the Permian-Triassic exinction event... and they were about all that made it through. For a time 95% of all of the vertebrates on land were a subspecies of Lystrosaurus. Scientists appear to have a wide variety of theories on why this may be including 'they were just lucky'. This, of course, is basically the academic equivalent of shrugging one's shoulders and declaring 'damned if we know'.

Sources/Further Reading:

Wikipedia

About

Beelzebufo

Part of the fun of the past is that it is populated by insanely giant things. One would think I'd get tired of it after the first few Absurdly Huge Versions Of Modern Animals, but, no.

Enter Beelzebufo ampinga: the devil frog.

Beelzebufo.

I'll just let that sink in while I repeat the name to myself in a hushed mystical tone.

Dinosaur: breakfast of champions

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

Kermit this is not. Modern frogs are usually pretty cute* as far as my standards go. I like the noise they make. Even when presented with a modern bird-munching fanged variety I find it hard to think of a frog as being the least bit intimidating.

But this is Beelzebufo: the devil frog. It was massive -- probably clocking in around 10 pounds. Beyond being the size of a basketball Beelzebufo had a mouth large enough that it seems likely that dinosaur chicks were on the menu. How did it aquire those adorible baby dinosaurs? Why by waiting in ambush for them, of course! Listen. That's not a frog -- that's a creature from one of the umpteen D&D monster manuals**.

Sources/ Further Reading:

Wikipedia

National Geographic

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*And, I will report from an unhappy personal experience, nowhere near as tasty as some people would lead you to believe.

**The perfect gift for the necromancer that has everything.

Hesperornis

Okay. Let's start out with one from the last post. Hesperornis.

Stop for a moment, and enter the realm of imagination. Are we there? Imagining? I'll assume we are.

In front of you lies an ocean, spanning into the distance. Something gray, about four of five feet long, and kind of pointy on one end appears to be frolicking in the waves. I bet it's a dolphin. Oh happy day. I do love dolphins.

We zoom in using our spectacular imagino-goggles. It's not a dolphin.

It's not a dolphin at all.

(Image Source: Wikipedia)

Hesperornis is one of the animals which inspired this blog's existence in the first place. I was reading up, all innocent like, on prehistoric birds and suddenly I stumbled upon this. Hesperornis species got up to five feet in length. Their legs were oddly jointed and configured so that they couldn't stand upright -- scientists think they flopped around like the least cuddly seals on the planet when/if they ventured on to land. Their feet weren't webbed like a respectable bird* -- no they had these weird flat paddle toes. And to top it all off, there's this long, pointy, beak loaded down with vicious little bird teeth.

I'm not going to say that this should be the first extinct animal we clone, but, evil scientists, if you're reading, this thing has prospects. Sharks, piranha, even crocodiles -- so over done. But look at that long, serpentine neck, those pointy bird teeth, that face -- neither quite bird, or quite fish. Now imagine a pod of these augmented to follow your every command.

A few laser beams implanted in their eyes later and you're the king of the sea.

I'm just sayin'.

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* Or Aquaman.

Sources/Further Reading:

Wikipedia

National Geographic

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!