Living between about 2.5 million and 13,000 years ago, it would have stood around 80cm tall (2′7″), with a wingspan of almost 2m (6′6″) and a fairly hefty body weight of 3kg (6.6lbs). Its feet had less grasping ability than other eagles but it also had particularly strong leg muscles, suggesting it was much better adapted for walking around on the ground.
With its large size, long legs, and terrestrial habits it seems to have convergently evolved to fill the same ecological niche as the modern secretarybird – a grassland-dwelling walking predator that hunted on foot, kicking and stomping small prey animals like snakes, lizards, and rodents.
While this might look like a sci-fi alien design, it was actually a very real Earth animal!
This strange-looking creature was Clausocaris lithographica, a member of a group of unique marine arthropods known as thylacocephalans. Only about 3.5cm long (1.4″), it lived in a shallow tropical lagoon environment during the Late Jurassic of Germany, about 150-145 million years ago.
Like most other thylacocephalans it had a narrow flattened shield-like carapace, three pairs of large grasping limbs, and a battery of swimming appendages further back – along with absolutely enormous bulbous eyes. Based on this anatomy it would have been a highly visual hunter, using its huge eyes to locate prey items and then snagging them with its long spiny limbs.
And we’re not even entirely sure what type of arthropods thylacocephalans actually were. They’re generally thought to be some sort of crustacean, but their highly modified anatomy makes linking up their exact evolutionary affinities very difficult. Whatever they were, they must have been incredibly successful as a group because they first appeared in the early Cambrian (~518 mya) and survived all the way into the Late Cretaceous (~94 mya).
While most modern toothed whales have jaws full of teeth that are all the same simple pointed shape – an adaptation for better holding onto slippery prey – their ancient ancestors had teeth much more like other mammals, with differentiated incisors, canines, and molars.
In-between them were whales like Inticetus vertizi, which lived off the coast of southwestern Peru during the Early Miocene, about 18 million years ago.
At over 3.5m long (11′6″) it was one of the larger known toothed whales around at the time, but it wasn’t the direct ancestor of any living whales. Instead it was more of an evolutionary “cousin” to them, part of an older offshoot lineage that lived alongside the early members of modern toothed whale groups.
Inticetus had a long and unusually wide-based snout, somewhat croc-like in appearance, with sharp pointed teeth at the front and multi-lobed cheek teeth further back. A lack of obvious wear on its back teeth suggests it wasn’t using them to chew up its food, and it may have had a fairly specialized diet – possibly using those back teeth to sieve small prey out of the water in a similar manner to modern lobodontine seals.
Closeup of Inticetus‘ jaws
Inticetus-like teeth have also been found in Miocene-aged deposits in the eastern USA, the Atlantic coast of France, and southeast Italy, indicating that this ancient whale lineage was quite widespread.
Modern mammals are the only surviving members of a much larger evolutionary group known as the synapsids – which back in the Permian period were the dominant land vertebrates.
Diademodon tetragonus here lived right in the wake of the extinction during the Early and Middle Triassic, about 251-242 million years ago. Around 2m long (6′6″), it was one of the largest known cynodonts, and it must have been a fairly successful species since it ranged across a large chunk of Pangaea, known from modern southern Africa, South America and Antarctica.
It had pig-like cheekbones and enormous jaw muscles, along with sharp incisors and canine teeth at the front of its jaws and grinding molars at the back. This arrangement suggests that much like modern pigs it may have been an opportunistic omnivore, occasionally snacking on smaller animals and carrion – although an isotope analysis of its teeth indicates the vast majority of its diet was probably still vegetation in shady damp environments.
But perhaps the most impressively-horned croc was Voay robustus here.
Voay lived on the island of Madagascar during the Late Pleistocene and Holocene, between about 100,000 and 2,000 years ago. At about 5m long (16′5″) it was similar in size and build to a large male Nile crocodile – but despite this resemblance its closest living relative is actually the much smaller dwarf crocodile.
It had a fairly short and deep snout and chunky limbs, adaptations associated with a more terrestrial lifestyle that suggest it was specialized for hunting its prey on land rather than just at the water’s edge.
Much like modern horned crocodiles its particularly prominent horns were probably used for territorial displays, and may have been a sexually dimorphic feature with big mature males having the largest examples.
Voay’s disappearance just a couple of thousand years ago may have been the result of the arrival of human settlers on the island, either from being directly hunted or due to the large native species it preyed on also going extinct around the same time.
Measuring about 1.2m long (3′11″), it had some unusual features for a temnospondyl – a very rectangular skull with a wide blunt snout, and elongated spines on its vertebrae that gave its body a sort of “hump-backed” shape.
It was part of a lineage of temnospondyls called capitosaurs, which mostly occupied the same sort of aquatic predator niche as modern crocodiles – but unlike its close relatives Sclerothorax’s well-developed spine and limbs suggest it spent much more time walking around on land.
(And while there was another temnospondyl known to have similar extended vertebrae – the sail-backed Platyhystrix – the two weren’t actually closely related to each other.)
Kubanochoerus gigas lived about 15-7 million years ago during the mid-to-late Miocene, and ranged across a large portion of Eurasia with fossils known from both Georgia and China.
It was one of the largest known pig species to ever live, slightly bigger than the modern giant forest hog at about 1.2m tall at the shoulder (3′11″). But its most distinctive features were its horns, with a small pair above its eyes and a single large forward-pointing one on its forehead.
A few specimens lack the large horn, and so some paleontologists consider it to be a sexually dimorphic trait possessed only by males. But it’s currently unclear whether this was actually the case, since at least one “hornless” skull has been reported with the distinctive larger tusks also associated with male pigs – so it’s possible that the horned and hornless Kubanochoerus were actually separate species!
Many modern birds are capable of seeing into the ultraviolet regions of the electromagnetic spectrum, and some of their non-avian dinosaur ancestors might have had the same sort of vision. And much like their living relatives, that means various parts of their bodies and plumage may also have been UV-reflective and UV-fluorescent.
So here’s a Velociraptor with some speculative UV coloration – although this is just what it would look like to human eyes under a blacklight. What it would actually look like to a creature that can see extra colors is impossible to depict on a screen designed for trichromatic vision!
Although it was a distant evolutionary cousin to plesiosaurs (and even more distantly to modern turtles), it was actually most closely related to an early sauropterygian lineage known as the pachypleurosaurs – a group of small lizard-like aquatic reptiles with tiny heads, long necks, and paddle-like limbs.
It had an unusually short and rounded-off snout compared to its relatives, and since it would have lived alongsidemanyotherdiversemarinereptiles it was probably specialized for a slightly different ecological niche.
