Month: January 2021

Doryaspis

While Doryaspis nathorsti here looked a bit like a weird prehistoric sawfish, it was actually an ancient jawless fish more closely related to modern lampreys and hagfish.

Measuring just 15cm long (6″), this odd little fish lived in the shallow seas of what is now the Arctic Svalbard archipelago, around 407 million years ago during the early Devonian period when the region was located in much more tropical latitudes.

It was part of a group called the heterostracans, a lineage of jawless fish with heavy armor covering the fronts of their bodies. They had no paired fins and relied solely on their powerful tails for propulsion, and some like Doryaspis also developed large stiff wing-like projections from the sides of their armor that acted like hydrofoils to provide extra lift while swimming.

But the strangest feature of Doryaspis is that pointy serrated saw-like “snout” – which wasn’t actually a snout at all, but instead formed from a part of its jawless mouth roughly equivalent to the lower lip and chin.

It’s unclear what the purpose of this appendage was, but it might have been used for prey detection, probing around the muddy seafloor in a similar manner to sawfish or the big-chinned porpoise Semirostrum.

Shri

About 72 million years ago, in the Late Cretaceous of what is now Mongolia, a dead dromaeosaurid dinosaur lost its head.

30 years ago, in 1991, its headless fossilized remains were discovered during a joint Mongolian Academy of Sciences / American Museum of Natural History expedition in the Gobi Desert.

For a long time the specimen was known only by the nickname of “Ichabodcraniosaurus”, in reference to a character haunted by a headless ghost in the story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow – but now it’s finally been given a full scientific description and a proper name.

Say hello to the first new non-avian dinosaur of 2021, Shri devi!

Named after a buddhist deity, this little dinosaur was around 2m long (6’6″), roughly the size of a modern peacock or wild turkey. It was a very close relative of Velociraptor, but lived in a slightly different part of the ancient Gobi than its famous cousin, giving us a glimpse of how dromaeosaurid species varied across that region.

A map of the Gobi region of Mongolia and China, showing locations where various dromaeosaurid dinosaur fossils have been found.
[ From fig 28 in Turner, A. H. et al (2021). A New Dromaeosaurid from the Late Cretaceous Khulsan Locality of Mongolia. American Museum Novitates. https://doi.org/10.1206/3965.1 ]

Paraceratherium

While the largest animal known to ever exist is an aquatic mammal (the modern blue whale), mammals on land have never managed to attain the same sort of massive sizes seen in the sauropod dinosaurs. This is probably due to a combination of factors, including their reproductive strategies, metabolisms, and physiological differences like lacking internal air sacs – but even being limited to overall smaller body sizes, some of the mega-mammals known to have evolved during the Cenozoic were still absolutely enormous.

And one of the largest was Paraceratherium transouralicum.

(The exact name of this animal has a long and complicated history, and in various times and places it’s also been known as Indricotherium, Baluchitherium, and Pristinotherium.)

Found across much of Eurasia during the Oligocene, about 34-23 million years ago, Paraceratherium was part of an ancient lineage of long-legged hornless rhinoceroses. It stood around 4.8m tall at the shoulder (15’9″) – big enough that most modern humans would be able to walk right underneath its belly without even having to duck – and it had elongated limbs and a long neck that gave it an overall appearance much more like a giant weird horse than a rhino.

There was a pair of downward-pointing tusks at the front of its upper jaw, and the shape of the nasal region of its skull suggests its nose formed a short prehensile tapir-like trunk, which would have been used to help grab and strip leaves from high branches.

I’ve also reconstructed it here with a speculative dewlap on its neck, used for both display and thermoregulation.

Eons Roundup 9

New year, new PBS Eons commission roundup day!

  • An illustration of an extinct early walrus. Unlike modern walruses it has no tusks, more resembling a sea lion in appearance.
    Neotherium mirum
  • An illustration of an extinct species of walrus. It has shorter thicker tusks than modern walruses, and it's depicted grubbing around on a muddy seafloor for buried shellfish.
    Valenictus sp.

The ancient walruses Neotherium and Valenictus, from “How the Walrus Got Its Tusks”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKDGYGV2LK8

  • An illustration of an extinct nodosaur, a type of quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaur. Its body is covered in densely-packed knobbly spiky armor.
    Borealopelta markmitchelli (life restoration)
  • An illustration of the carcass of an extinct nodosaur, a type of quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaur. Its body is covered in knobbly spiky armor, and its belly is massively bloated up from trapped gasses, forcing it to have turned upside down.
    Borealopelta markmitchelli (“bloat-and-float” carcass)

The nodosaurid ankylosaur Borealopelta, in both alive and “bloat-and-float” carcass states, from “The Dinosaur Who Was Buried at Sea”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-UZXBF63z4

  • An illustration of an extinct ankylosaur, a type of quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaur. Its body is covered in knobbly spiky armor, but unlike most other ankylosaurids it has no bony club at the tip of its tail.
    Gobisaurus domoculus
  • An illustration of an extinct ankylosaur, a type of quadrupedal herbivorous dinosaur. Its body is covered in knobbly spiky armor, and it has a small bony club at the tip of its tail.
    Dyoplosaurus acutosquameus

The ankylosaurid ankylosaurs Gobisaurus and Dyoplosaurus, from “How Ankylosaurs Got Their Clubs”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRt-4SdzWrk