April 2022 – Nix Illustration

Antarcticarcinus

Euthycarcinoids were a group of arthropods that lived between the mid-Cambrian and the mid-Triassic – but despite existing for over 250 million years their fossil record is incredibly sparse, and it’s only within the last decade that they’ve been recognized as being close relatives of modern centipedes and millipedes.

The earliest members of this group were marine, living in shallow tidal waters, but they quickly specialized into brackish and freshwater habitats and were even some of the very first animals to walk on land. Fossil trackways show they were amphibious, venturing out onto mudflats to feed on microbial mats, avoid aquatic predators, and possibly lay their eggs in a similar manner to modern horseshoe crabs.

Most euthycarcinoid species are known from tropical and subtropical climates, but Antarcticarcinus pagoda here hints that these arthropods were much more widespread and diverse than previously thought. Discovered in fossil deposits in the Central Transantarctic Mountains of Antarctica, it lived in freshwater lakes during the Early Permian (~299-293 million years ago), at a time when the region was in similar polar latitudes to today with a cold icy subarctic climate.

About 8.5cm long (3.3″), it would have had a similar three-part body plan to other euthycarcinoids – with a head, a limb-bearing thorax, and a limbless abdomen ending in a tail spine – but its most distinctive feature was a pair of large wing-shaped projections on the sides of its carapace. These may have helped to stabilize its body when resting on soft muddy surfaces, spreading out its weight, or they might even have functioned as a hydrofoil generating lift while swimming.

Bathyergoides

Blesmols, or African mole-rats, are a group of rodents adapted for mole-like burrowing. Closely related to the more famous naked mole-rat, these little mammals have reduced eyes and ears along with incisors that protrude out even when their mouths are closed, allowing them to excavate tunnels primarily using their teeth.

One of the earliest known fossil blesmols is Bathyergoides neotertiarius here, from the early Miocene of Namibia about 20 million years ago. For almost a century this species was known only from teeth and partial skull remains, but recently a partial skeleton was described giving us a better idea of its overall appearance and lifestyle.

Bathyergoides was a fairly large blesmol, around 25cm long (~10″), and was already specialized for tooth-digging with a skull very similar to modern forms. It had powerful muscular forelimbs that would have been used to push back loose soil while burrowing, but unlike its living relatives it also had a long tail and relatively slender hindlimb bones – with anatomy suggesting its legs were used more for stabilizing its posture than for actively digging.

It may have had a less subterranean lifestyle than modern blesmols, digging out extensive burrows but still foraging for food above ground in a similar manner to modern semi-fossorial rodents like giant pouched rats.

Amargasaurus

Amargasaurus cazaui was a sauropod dinosaur with a very distinctive-looking skeleton, sporting a double row of long bony spines along its neck and back. It lived in what is now Argentina during the Early Cretaceous, about 129-122 million years ago, and was fairly small compared to many other sauropods, reaching about 10m in length (~33′) with a proportionally short neck compared to its body size.

And despite being known from fairly complete skeletal remains there’s still a lot we don’t know about this dinosaur – especially what was actually going on with those vertebral spines. While it’s sometimes been depicted with skin sails over the spines, for the last couple of decades the general opinion has trended towards them being more likely to have been covered by spiky keratinous horn-like sheaths.

But recently that’s been brought back into question. A detailed study of the microscopic bone structure of Amargasaurus‘ spines shows no evidence for keratin attachment and instead found textures associated with skin coverings, along with an extensive web of ligaments connecting the spines to each other along each row.

So maybe it had big flashy sails after all!

Eons Roundup 12 (& Published Art!)

It’s been a while since I last showed off some of these, but here’s some more commission work I’ve done for PBS Eons:

The metriorhynchid marine crocodilians Aggiosaurus and Cricosaurus, from “When Crocs Thrived in the Seas”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgqs_9BBX10

And… what’s this?

A familiar Scutellosaurus makes an appearance in a recently-published children’s dinosaur book!

April Fools 2022: The Aquatic Dinosaur That Wasn’t

So, Spinosaurus wasn’t technically the first known aquatic non-avian dinosaur.

That title instead temporarily went to Compsognathus corallestris.

While the idea that hadrosaurs and sauropods were wallowing swamp-dwellers had been completely abandoned at the start of the Dinosaur Renaissance, the new view of dinosaurs as active sophisticated animals led to a surprising aquatic hypothesis during the early days of this paleontological revolution.

A specimen of the small theropod Compsognathus discovered in southeastern France in the early 1970s was only the second skeleton ever found of this dinosaur, and came over a century after the first. It was initially thought to represent a new species since it was about 50% larger than the German specimen of Compsognathus longipes, and it seemed to have something very unusual going on with its hands – its forelimbs were somewhat poorly-preserved and distorted, and had traces of some sort of large fleshy structure around the hands that was interpreted as representing elongated three-fingered flippers used for swimming.

This wasn’t necessarily as ridiculous of an idea as it might sound. Compsognathus lived during the Late Jurassic, about 150 million years ago, at a time when Europe was a group of islands in a shallow tropical sea. A semiaquatic dinosaur specialized to swim and dive, hunting the abundant aquatic prey in its environment, and easily able to island-hop all around the European archipelago seemed at least somewhat plausible, and reconstructions of fin-handed C. corallestris even appeared in several popular dinosaur books of the time.

But it didn’t last.

Within just a few years doubt was being cast on this idea, and further studies of both known Compsognathus skeletons in the late 1970s and early 1980s concluded that C. corallestris was actually a fully-grown adult individual of the juvenile C. longipes. The French Compsognathus had normal-looking hands for its kind after all, with two large clawed fingers and a vestigial third finger, and the “flipper” impressions had just been ripples in the fossil slab.

For a long time after that the general view became that there just weren’t any aquatic non-avian dinosaurs at all – but more recent discoveries like the new Spinosaurus material and Halszkaraptor are starting to suggest that some of these animals were much more at home in the water than previously thought.

Something resembling Compsognathus corallestris might still surprise us in the future.